Subway Art

I had to jump on the bandwagon and make my own subway art. I made this for Craftster's monthly challenge for May.

Here's the finished product:

The crooked Y in RECYCLE is driving me crazy. I may end up fixing it, but I'm pretty lazy.

Here's a close up on the skull scissors Craftster dude. The Challenge was to use one of the Craftser images because it's their 50th challenge.

I used my printer to print out the words I thought I might like to use. I used Open Office (like Microsoft Word, but a free program) to write out the words. They're all in Helvetica, some bold and some "skinny."

To get the letters to turn out white on a black background, highlite the letters in black, and the default text color is usually white. If it's not, change the text color to white.

I initially made them all the same size.

I then used scissors and a craft knife to cut all the letters out. If you have a Cricut, I'd advise using it. Or if you have a printer that's NOT PMSing like mine, print them out in high quality and then cut the words out in rectangles.

Then I laid them out on my canvas which I had previously painted black.

After doing this, I realized they'd look better had I used different font sizes. Because I already went through the work to cut them all out, I chose to re-do CRAFT and SEW, making the first one bigger, and the latter smaller.

I used Mod Podge and a small paint brush to glue each letter on. In an attempt to get them somewhat straight I used a post-it note to line them up. As you can see in the final result, I still didn't manage to do a great job of this!

In the end I'm pretty in love with it. I'm glad my canvas was only about 10"x8" because it was a lot of work!

To finish it off, I distressed the edges and the sides with some fine grit sand paper!