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I discovered a way to make printed digital download art look like real paintings! You only need a few inexpensive tools to achieve this look.
While I love the look of family photos in a home, I feel like they only belong in certain areas. No one needs to see your family vacation to Disney while they’re using your bathroom. But hey! Your house your rules.
We renovated our whole house in 2018 and I’ve been struggling to fill the spaces with décor ever since. I am not a tchotchke person which makes the task of decorating significantly harder. I love the look of eclectic gallery walls, but can’t afford *art* yet. So when I stumbled upon digital download art on Etsy, I was immediately intrigued.
You can find pre-arranged gallery wall collections, original artwork, quotes, and so much more in every style imaginable. It helps to know what type of art you’re looking for before you begin your search, otherwise you can quickly get lost in a sea of choices.
Choose your art
Once you’ve found the digital download art you want to use, its time to print it! I have mine printed as documents or posters (depending on the size I need) at Staples. Anything 8×10 and smaller is ~$.70 per cardstock sheet, and a 12×18 poster is $10. The color quality is really amazing and they offer same day printing at a lot of stores.
I’ve had numerous pieces of digital download art printed before, but something always felt off about them. I realized after some trial and error that putting them in a frame with glass is not how you would frame an actual painting, and that is very much the *vibe* I was going for. So I ditched the glass in my frames… but something was still wrong.
I finally put the pieces together and realized I needed them to look like they were actually painted and not just printed!
Time to get crafty
I had some extra mod podge laying around from a previous project and decided that if I ruined a print by experimenting, it was cheap enough to just print it again. So I found a coarse paint brush and tried to mimic the effects of paint on canvas. It was a little scary at first because the mod podge starts off looking like craft glue, but I was hoping it would dry as clear as the bottle said. I made light strokes from top to bottom, then side to side, making sure to leave some of the opposite strokes visible. Then I left it to dry completely.
I have the patience of a toddler, so waiting for it to dry was hard. Once it was finally dry I was thrilled with how it came out! It made it look so realistic and gave it such a lovely texture. The mod podge also acted as a protective layer against dust/fingerprints since the glass was being removed from the frame.
The cross-grain texture I added was awesome, but I wanted to see if other textures were nice, too. So I did another test print of circular strokes, and a third of just vertical strokes. They all add a really unique touch to the prints – it was hard to pick a favorite!
Museum Ready
I am so excited to hang these DIY’d digital download art prints in my office! If you couldn’t tell from the photos, I’m going for a vintage female portrait theme with a twist. Do you have any printed art you’re going to DIY like this? Show me in the comments!!
[…] definitely the pièce de résistance of the whole room! You can read how I DIY’d the prints here. I thrifted all the frames over time and painted them using a wax based paint to give uniformity. […]