B Loves B ~ Inexpensive Art

Confession; I am a bit wedding obsessed.  I was before I met Bill, but it only became worse after.  Fortunately he’s a good sport about it, and even gets excited about little details he thinks might be fun too.  (Penn State creamery ice cream shipped to a destination wedding?  WHY NOT?!  You haven’t lived ’til you’ve had Peachy Paterno!)

NO, nobody’s put a ring on it, but we’re grown-up enough to know this is legit.  This is real.  It is something we both want, in time.  In the meantime, we have fun with the daydreams while we take each day as it comes.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I am a frequent reader of Wedding Chicks.  When they came out with this Floral Heart Monogram printable freebie, I fell in love!  We already had an as-is frame from Ikea waiting for it.  But I wasn’t a fan of the font used for the letter options, nor did I like the purple hues.  So I used their free generator and downloaded the PDF of their version of B loves B.

It was super cute, but where I wanted to hang it was right about our towel rack in the bathroom.  I was trying to add a bit more of a feminine touch with new pretty Better Homes and Gardens towels, and wanted to match some of the sea greens that the towels had.  Fortunately I know my way around Photoshop, so I opened her up in there and used the color replacement tool (tutorial on that available here) to adjust certain parts and colors in the image until I got rid of the purple.  I also cloned a few flowers to fill in some of the space, and replaced the original purple Bs with more crisp looking Bs using the font Ravi.  Then I just printed it out on our home printer and popped it into the frame.

Now, for your own personal use, I’m sure the Wedding Chicks won’t mind you doing this.  After all, it was a free printable!  But if you plan to use this for stationary purposes, or for your actual wedding invites, you may want to check with them first.  But for a quick piece of water-color-esque artwork, I think it looks pretty darn good!

Bill’s Grandmother actually complemented me on it, thinking I had painted it!  So clearly the Wedding Chicks did a great job.  I just tweaked it to make it my own.  That’s what DIYing is all about!

Have you come up with any quick and easy artwork lately?

~ Beth