Project Pinterest: Palette Knife Art

Last weekend was craftastic – I decided that the living room needed a refresh, so I started with four blank canvases and ended with a new wall of art! This palette knife art was the first project I tackled – super simple, with impressive results. My inspiration comes from one of my favorite DIY blogs, Bower Power.

I pinned it a few weeks ago, and it was the first project that came to mind when I started thinking about what I wanted up on our walls. You could definitely work with any color palette, but I had already decided to go with blues and greens for the living room – so I followed the tutorial to a T! Let’s get started!

Palette Knife Art

Time: Maybe 30 minutes

Cost: About $20, depending on what you already own (individual prices listed under supplies)

Supplies:

craft paint (4-5 colors – I bought this set of Martha Stewart craft paint, but individually each color runs about $2-3)
palette knife ($3)
stretched canvas (this 15X30 was about $7)
paper plate or other surface for mixing paints

Instructions:

Squirt a bit of each color onto your paint-mixing surface – I used a paper plate, which was perfect for keeping it all contained and then easily thrown away afterwards. When choosing your colors, you want a range of light to dark – I went with greens and blues, the lightest being a pastel and the darkest a navy.

With your palette knife, mix a couple colors together. Starting at one end of the canvas, scrape a straight line to make a square or rectangle. Continue across the canvas, and again in straight lines down the canvas.

Just keep going until the canvas is filled with rows of squares- it’s super easy! Try to keep mixing colors together, and if you get a few in a row that are too similar, just scrape another layer on top. About halfway through, my squares started running together and the colors started to look a little “muddy,” so I wiped off the palette knife and added some fresh paint on the paper plate to get back on track.

Ta da! This was really fun – hard to mess up, and the final product looks great. This is a great project when you need to fill up a canvas of any size – and of course, you don’t have to do straight lines. The palette knife makes it easy to do slanted squares or rectangles, other geometric shapes, or you could do a chevron or cross hatch pattern. Lots of possibilities!