Custom Canvas
31/05/2025
Having recently adorned a feature wall with some artwork, the other walls remained stark and empty. However, adding more frames would've made the place look like a poorly attended gallery. I knew the kind of colour scheme and abstract feel that would work in the space but, after a while of trawling online shops, I realised it was futile to search the internet's infinite ether in the hope someone had made something to match my vision.
So I figured: why not just do it myself? It only had to look better than bare wall. Could an abstract painting even have mistakes? It would cost £25 to find out, which was 5-10x cheaper than retail prices.
I bought a couple of cheap canvases and used leftover wall paint to ensure a perfect colour match. Initially, I greatly overestimated how much paint would be required to fade from one colour to the other. Starting with half a tub of blue and iteratively adding 50% white as the gradient progressed, I quickly realised how the overall quantity of paint increases with each dilution, so a 50% volume grows rather quickly with each step! I was soon pouring excess paint into a second bucket and realised my serious miscalculation. It transpired that mixing paint by dabbing onto a scrap piece of cardboard was more than enough.
I offset the canvases to balance how the wall was filled. It's quite an old property and nothing is central. For example, the midpoint between the doors is not the midpoint of the fireplace. I often use asymmetry to mitigate this; something can't be off-centre if you didn't try to centre it.
It seemed logical to continue the gradient across both canvases, instead of duplicating it, so they were visually entwined as a single art piece. I planned for the bluest and whitest sides of the canvases to borrow a rectangle from each other, but parallelograms gave a preferred sense of motion, which is as advanced as my artistry stretched.
I was really pleased with the outcome. The joy of making your own decor is it perfectly matches the space in a way shop-bought pieces can't. It infuses the walls of your property with a bit of your soul, which is what a home should be.