30 Things in 30 Days: Thing #18—Make Wall Art!

Today our Awesome Thing was finishing some wall art for Hollie's room, since some of her walls are still empty vast areas of gray that threaten to stunt her creativity (not really). Of the 30 Things so far, this might be my favorite task yet.

One of the best parts of this art project is that it really is half David's brainchild and half mine. We proved the old saw true that "two heads are better than one," which is really saying something for us, because the adage that typically depicts mine and David's working together is "too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup." Literally, David and I cannot cook in the kitchen together. We both love cooking, but we go about following recipes in very different ways (David moves fast, I don't). We are also hesitant to cook meals that the other has already made in the past—I make shepherd's pie, tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets), any kind of fish dinner, and homemade chicken fingers; David's territory includes chicken verde enchiladas (no cream-of-anything soup involved), chickpea curry, bulgogi (Korean beef), and chicken tikka masala. David is also an ace at grilled cheese sandwiches; the first time I ever made him a grilled cheese sandwich, I almost had a panic attack. When he said, "You like to put a lot of cheese in yours, huh?" I burst into tears (even though he said it as a statement, not a criticism). We both take a lot of pride in what we do well, and we both want to do well for each other. This is certainly a good quality that we have as married people, but it does complicate recipe-sharing.

David and I are also much better competitive players than collaborative ones, usually. We are great at playing board games with each other—David is my ultimate rival, and playing board games with him is fun because it is almost always a close game (except in Yahtzee. I've had maybe one Yahtzee since getting married....David always gets two or three in a single game). The only game we can really work together on is probably Cranium, and most likely because Cranium involves one partner doing and one partner guessing (We are real aces at Cranium: ask our friends. We'll beat anybody). But as soon as we are both on the doing side of things, we start to step on each others' toes. One of the closest times I've ever had to being earnestly frustrated with David was when we spent a Family Home Evening making a tower out of uncooked spaghetti noodles and marshmallows. He was so bossy! (I'm pretty sure he felt the same way about me. Actually, I was probably more passive aggressive than bossy: "Well, if you really think we should put more noodles in the marshmallows here for a pyramid base and basically undo everything I've done on this foundational square, then I guess I'll stop my idea and do it your way.")

Don't get me wrong—I love doing things with Dave. We love birding, watching the same films, reading the same books, taking walks and drives, talking about everything and anything, and we are actually really good at decorating our house together and making fundamental decisions about our lives together. It's just in creative projects that we usually do better in thinking up ideas on our own, doing them, and then surprising each other with what we created. Our creative ideas are almost always gifts intended for the other.

But this wall art was an extraordinarily smooth synthesis of Dave's smarts and my own. We knew we wanted to do something with her name. I knew I wanted to watercolor—Dave came up with the idea of the colored paper letter cutouts. Then the thing just evolved. We somehow agreed on rainbow colors, on stripes and spots, and when we realized that we couldn't feasibly frame something this big on our pitiful budget, I came up with the idea to hang the letters on string with clothespins, and David suggested we raise the letters a little bit for a shadowed, three-dimensional effect.

The best part is that the end result is way better than either of us originally imagined. We think it is because we somehow managed to channel our different creative powers to make a collaborative project that not only made working together a joy, but it also enabled us to still surprise the other and ourselves with ideas that we couldn't have come up with on our own.

We still have plans for expanding on this art, but that will have to wait for a different day.

The watercolor paper warped a little, so we glued each paper to some mat board with rubber cement to strengthen and stiffen them. Dave made me glue them outside because he worried about the fumes and the baby. Apparently, his elementary school's glue-of-choice was not rubber cement (I sniffed so much rubber cement in second grade, I probably went through withdrawals over summer vacation).

If you know us well, you can still maybe guess which papers I painted and which David did. For example, notice how pristine, straight, and smooth the orange lines are for "O"—those are Dave's. Compare with the messier, more crooked and oddly spaced lines for "L" and "E"—I did those. My favorite is probably "H"; we did that one together, and it was originally intended as a practice paper. 

Dave came up with the raised letters sort of late in the game, so rather than return to Hobby Lobby again (for the second time in one day and the fourth time in one week), he took an exacto knife to one of Hollie's diaper boxes.

Et voilá! Our baby's name in vibrant rainbow awesomeness.

Here's the full wall look. It has done well to take up at least a good part of the formerly blank drab expanse of wall. And yeah, that's right: that's a Popple in my baby's toy net. Jealous much?

The extreme angle to show off our shadow effects.

Hollie even worked collaboratively with us by playing with the bird on my purse for almost an hour while Dave and I glued, cut, and hung up her new art. What a good baby.

Thing #18: Make Wall Art = ACCOMPLISHED!