I'll steal your art with a smile on my face

Individuals suffering from drug addictions will often resort to immoral acts to obtain their drug of choice when money is not available. 

Art addicts are no different.

Hello. My name is Hollie and I'm an artaholic... and I steal art.

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OK, that's a wee bit of an exaggeration. I don't really steal art. I just take it.

I didn't steal this though. I bought it from Salvation Army for $2 yesterday. I can't tell if it's hand drawn or not but it's so simple and I love it! Just thought I'd share this with you.

Now when I say, I take art I mean I take it from magazines. Just that easy. I collect magazines for the art. I see something I like and then I take it. Now the "proper" way to obtain the art would be to look at the art in the magazine, look up the artist online, visit his/her's website and order a print of the art you saw. If you don't have the money to buy one of those expensive prints, you can dress up in your best bustier and stand on the street corner for a couple of days, make some mad cash and then buy one... but in the infamous words of Sweet Brown:

Hee hee! I don't think that taking art from a magazine is a big deal. If they didn't want you to have it, then they wouldn't put full page displays of the art in there.

So, now that I'm done with my early spring cleaning I've decided to spruce things up a little bit more by adding some more art to my home. Free art...

I bought this frame from Salvation Army yesterday too and I've been hanging on to this old Juxtapoz magazine for a few years because I'm not done tearing out all the images I want.

I liked the faux antique finish of the frame but I wanted it to be dark in color like the rest of the frames in the house so here's how I did it:

I globbed on a layer of gel wood stain and let it dry for a few minutes (regular brown paint would have worked but I didn't have any). Then I took an old towel and gently wiped some of it away so that the stain would only be in the nooks. Next I dabbed on some glossy black paint and let that dry for about ten minutes. Last, I took the towel and wiped off the black paint using a light sweeping like motion (like brushing something off). That makes sure the black stays mostly in the nooks and a little bit on the raised embellishment for that distressed metal look.

And there ya go! 

I missed a bit of black paint on the top right part of the frame but no one's going to see that part if it's hanging on the wall.

The metal frame in the photo below has been hanging around the house for quite some time now. In my cleaning adventures I decided that everything either needs to serve a purpose, have a place or begone- so I gave it purpose!

While I'm on the topic of taking art, here's another way I've done it:

Lovely Bob Dylan sketch right? And I did it all by myself right? Yes and no.

I found a Bob Dylan stencil online, colored in the negative space on MS Paint and placed a piece of paper over my computer screen and shaded everything in in a "sketchy" hand drawn sort of way so that it looks like a real sketch. A more simple way to describe this method is using a pencil and paper instead of spray paint and public property.

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Bonus:

My sister-in-law's divorce was finalized earlier this week. Now I'm not a fan of divorce (it's a religious thing for me, not going talk about that here) but when a woman is married to a First Class hose nozzle... ugh. 

So, in celebration of her freedom I made bought her a cake and decorated it myself!