Wall Art on the Fly...and for Cheap

I would not describe myself as artsy. My sister Mary, on other hand, super artsy, so I try to be like her. She does more abstract stuff, which isn't really my style, but the fact that she just picks up a paint brush and gets going inspires me. So a few months ago, during my fall break, I decided to try my hand at painting something simple and meaningful for our family. We have a TON of empty wall space and it taking us forever to fill it up, but this was a good meaningful way to get something up on the wall.

Using a few random art supplies I had around the house (canvas, acrylic paints, some stencils, and a few paint brushes), I was able to throw these little pieces together. The blue and burnt orange are two colors that you can see throughout our house (and I could easily make these particular shades with the random paints I had).

The one on the left is our anniversary which is coming up! And...believe it or not, the one of the left is suppose to be an "O" for Oertle. Unfortunately people always ask me what the zero stands for, which honestly makes me want to take these down sometimes. I am convinced that people only think it is a zero because it is next to another piece with numbers. I didn't even think about it being interpreted that way when I made them because we used the same stencil to make signs for our wedding reception. 

 No one seemed to confused the "O" for a zero then! Wah-wah. What matters most is that I like those pieces of art that I made for our house. They probably won't be permanent, but they satisfy our need for wall art, add some color to the hallway, and always remind me of our special day!

To make these little paintings, all I did was measure the inches of the canvas and draw the different lines for the horizontal stripe. Then on top of those lines, I traced the numbers (or letter). I only had letter stencils, so I improvised by printing out some large numbers on Word and used those. After tracing the whole pattern, I just started painting. I wanted the two pieces to work together, so I used the same colors but opted to alternate the use of the colors on each canvas. 

Just  little pic to show a bit of the process

All in all, I love how they turned out-despite the fact that most people think I have a random zero painted and hung on our wall. Maybe I should try to come up with some special significance for the zero...Any ideas?