Paint Chip Wall Art

This week features a rather fun project for me: paint chip art! This, fortunately, is one of those almost-free things that you can do!

 I actually got the idea for this particular project a while ago, when I saw a particularly creative picture on Facebook of paint chips artistically attached to an apartment wall in a rainbow collage-type-thing.

I immediately set out to collect paint chips, and got all that I could get my hands on... and when I got home, I promptly realized that I lacked the wall space to create a masterpiece like the one I had seen, so I stored them all away in a box.

 Luckily, I recently found this unused cork-board around our house recently, and I decided to use it.

 I organized my color chips into sizes.

 Starting with the biggest ones, I started placing them

 I then added all of the medium ones.

 At this point,  I rather liked the design that was emerging, but wanted to spruce it up with some smaller ones, so I stapled down the big ones at a few key junction points, then started placing the smaller ones.

 This was the whole after-stapling collage of big ones. I could have been done here, but I liked the smaller 'pixel' look that I had seen, so I added some small ones. Unfortunately, I didn't like how it looked. Or how the second one looked. Or the third.

 Eventually, I settled on this design as one I liked. It almost made me sad, knowing that I wasn't taking advantage of the big ones underneath at all, but one of the big things I learned from this one was that trial and error are essential to this type of art.

And there we go! The final product! As it happens, I did sort of end up using the big one, as I decided to forego the right edge chips in favor of the big ones showing through, rather than cutting them.

Hopefully, I will, by next week, have up the follow-up to this project. No hints, except that this is only the first half, but in the meantime, enjoy your new collage! (also, one thing I like about this- it's easy and cheap enough that, if you decide you want to change the colors, it's easy enough to rip a chip off and re-staple something else in instead)