Painted Cork Board

This week I hung up pictures in my bedroom (finally).  I have a cork board that's been hanging around for a while now, and I wanted to hang it in my room because it's so darn useful for pinning up stuff that I have no idea what else to do with.

Originally, it was just a cork board with a wood frame, the wood being about the same color as the cork.  A while back I painted the frame blue to make it... prettier, I guess.  But blue isn't one of my colors I (try to) use in my bedroom, so I figured I'd use the day off for Independence Day and give it a repaint.

My bedroom is roughly Japanese themed.  I've got a few pictures with bamboo and kanji and that sort of thing, some hanging lanterns, a katana sword, etc. and I try to go for a color scheme that's cream, bamboo-green, and maybe a little red here and there.  So, how about a cream colored cork board with a green boarder?  Then I thought maybe I'd take it a step further and paint some kind of picture or symbol onto the face of the board.  I decided using a picture from a hanafuda card would be cool.

Hanafuda is a deck of cards from Japan that uses pictures rather than symbols and numbers.  I've loved them ever since I was introduced to them, because I think the pictures are gorgeous.

The cards are organized into twelve suits (with four cards per suit), each with a different plant/flower.  Each flower corresponds to a month in the year, so to narrow things down, I went with my birth month of February, which is plum blossoms.

Thank you hanafuda.com for this picture.  You're a life saver.

After that, I chose the card with the bird on it, because... birds are cool, that's why.  After a little research I learned the bird is a Japanese bush warbler.  They're a common and popular songbird in Japan, and hearing the warbler sing is one of the first signs that spring is on it's way.  Since plum trees bloom so early it's practically still winter, both images on the card are associated with early spring in Japan.

And a partridge warbler in a pear plum treeeee!

So then!  Ready!  Set!  Paint!

Here you can see the color the cork and the frame were originally, and the new color for the cork.

Once the cork was painted, I drew the image on with pencil and then outlined it with sharpie.  I knew as I was outlining it that I would end up painting on the lines on accident and would have to redraw the lines.  Honestly, though, I'm such a sucker for being able to see my progress that sometimes I jump the gun.

The image got painted and the lines cleaned up.  Painting was pretty easy because the cards have a limited color pallet, so pink flowers are shown as red, and there's no shading or color variations.  For the green, I had to add some gray to the paint to keep the bird from being neon, but for rest of the colors I could use the paint straight out of the bottle without having to mix colors.

And the frame was painted the same shade as the bird.  All done!

All painting was done with acrylic paints and just slapped on there without any prep work or post work or sealers or mediums or any of those darn fangled contraptions.  Just good ol' paint.  That's how I roll.

---

In other news:

*I've got my saddle bag for my Fluttershy cosplay.  I went ahead and bought the purse I had seen at Walmart.  Then I cut a butterfly out of felt and glued it on the front.  Nothing really special, so no picture.

*Javert-Plush has pants, and a pattern made for his top.  Pants aren't really all that exciting, though, so no picture, either.  Once he gets his whole outfit, I'll post a pic.

That's all!

Peace out!