Project 13 Week 17 – Paint Chip Art

And so continues my exploration into paint chips, and what can be done with them!  This time I focused on Benjamin Moore paint chips, which are harder to make into things, since they are long and skinny.  So I decided to use them for their main component, bright pretty colors, and I came up with some fun new art!

Basically I used standard Benjamin Moore paint strips, with either 3 or 4 colors on them, and then sliced them into 1/8″ slices with my Olfa blade.  I then glued them to a base piece of paper with a glue stick, since I was worried that a wetter glue like Elmer’s or Sobo would warp the paper.  

Because most of the paint strips were only 3 colors and similar in length to my space, the white bits ended up in roughly two chunks.  Now the look is kind of fun, so I don’t really mind it, but if I had used longer paint strips I would have been able to alternate the white bits throughout the whole piece.

These are also pretty small overall, the frames are 5″x7″ and the opening in the mat is 3″x5″, but I can also envision adding strips end to end to make a larger piece of art.  Also, while the standard square Benjamin Moore paint chips and the standard Behr paint chips are the same width (roughly 2″) there are paint chips, some made by Benjamin Moore, which have more chips on each strip, because each chip is thinner.  This would obviously give a more varied look to each art piece.

I can also envision these in a simpler color palette, maybe to match a room’s decor.  Who knows, when paint chips are involved the sky’s the limit!

Ciao, Allison

*UPDATE: Check out the new color schemes I’ve made, based on this same idea.  See the blue/gray version here and the red version here.