Wall Art: Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be Alright

I had lots of ideas for the mantle wording (check out my Pinterest board for it), but I kept envisioning this typography.  It is super similar to the artwork in baby sis’s room and originally I thought I wouldn’t like both being so similar.  However, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.  So, similar it is.

I started off with a fence panel.  We had a leftover piece from putting up our privacy fence so I just used that section.  (The panel was a 4×8 panel).  I cut off the notched top and shortened the ends so the entire artwork board was 30×42 (or somewhere similar in that range).

Then I sanded it down along the top and edges to smooth out the roughness a little.  I didn’t put too much effort into it because I wanted it to look rustic and distressed and knew the roughness would help.

After sanding, I put a coat of dark walnut stain on.  This way, when I distress the paint at the end, the stain will show through.

Once the stain dried I put a coat or two of white paint on and let it dry.

Now for the difficult part…. the font.  If you’re familiar with Photoshop, this is pretty simple.  If not, well….. play around 🙂

1. Create a new canvas in Photoshop the size of your board/fence.  Mine was 30×42.  (72ppi)
2. Type the wording onto your ‘canvas” in PS.  I used two different fonts, and angled the word “every”.  You can do this in any way you like… move the words around, change the sizes, stretch it out etc.
3. Then, using the “rulers” on the edge of the canvas in PS I pulled out gridlines every 8 inches across and every 10 inches down.  This created 15 different 8×10 grid spaces.  (there was a 2″ space on the far right that I didn’t worry about)
4.  Then I used the Rectangular Marquee Tool to “frame” around the first 8×10 grid and cropped it. Saved it as “1”.  Then I hit “edit” “Step Backward” so that my entire canvas showed again.  I took the Rectangular Marquee Tool and framed/cropped teh 2nd 8×10 square, saving it as “2”.  Repeat this process until all 15 have been saved.
5.  Then I printed all of the 8×10’s out and taped them together.