collaborative abstract art with Katie

Katie and her husband Matt recently bought a cute little house in the next town over and after months of rehabbing, they finally got to the fun part; making their house a home. And I guess that's the part where I come in.. ;)

The Antonells like simple clean lines, modern art/design and neutrals with pops of bright color.  When they were ready to decorate, Katie had the idea of me teaching/helping her create some brightly colored, simple abstract art for her walls...

Ok, honestly, I was a little lot skeptical, but my brave little sister went out and bought a bunch of canvases, so there was no going back! A few nights of painting later and we had enough art to fill many of her blanks walls with DIY abstract art.

We had tons of fun working together to create these pieces and I know I'm supposed to be "the artist", but Katie came up with great concepts and the majority of the designs were totally her idea. For example, the purple pieces in the living room were inspired by her house number, 99.

Not bad, little sis!

A few notes, in case you'd like to try something similar:

Materials: pre-stretched canvases, acrylic paints, palette knives and various sizes of brushes... (a sister with a little art/painting know-how? haha)

Purple 99s in the living room: I started with a pleasing curly line and then we switched off using purple and white to form the "9"s more clearly. We tried to keep it loose and a lot of the brush strokes visible.

Turquoise and white circles in the dining room/kitchen: We started by mixing a cool bluish-green and added a lot of white. We both had bit of a different shade and went to work creating texture by using palette knife to cover the background. After the paint was dry, we added some white over the dry paint for even more texture. We then painted the rims of various sized bowls with white paint and printed them onto our background in a pleasing design.

Small green/blue piece in the bathroom: This one started out as a very clean cut painting with crisp green and bluish-gray stripes.  It wasn't working for us at all, so I just started playing with it, adding interesting lines and textures with greens, yellows and blues. It ended up looking rather impressionistic, which we liked. 

Nightly prayer piece: Matt loves this prayer from The Book of Common Prayer and we decided to paint it in cursive on this large canvas for the bedroom. After painting the background white, I wrote out the prayer with pencil, then painted it with black paint. I love this and am thinking of creating something similar for my bedroom..lovely words to go to sleep to.