Repurposing an old picture

It was the long weekend this weekend and due to other plans and general chores, I hadn't had time to do anything particularly crafty.  Don't get me wrong, I did a bit of crocheting, but as much as I love it it doesn't soothe the crafting beast that lurks within me.  I was getting the shakes for the need to make something!

I had had a project in mind for some while now.  We had gotten a wood transfer painting of some fruit for our wedding 8 years ago and had only put it up in one of our many homes.  It was something that had to be in a kitchen or dining room and every place we have had, has had little to no space for something like that.  So it was always relegated to storage and moved from place to place. 

Last year at the Calgary Comic Expo, we got a bunch of prints signed by various artists/authors.  These too were regulated to storage with plans to frame them one day.  This is when the idea dawned on me.  I could paint the wood black and use my trusty Mod Podge to "frame" one of the prints myself!  I had also seen some things on Pinterest using old comic book pages to add a geeky flair to different items.  I thought this would be perfect for this project, providing more of a frame, rather than just the basic black.  I was discussing this with my hubby when he reminded me that he has a whole box of damaged comic books we could use!  We then decided this would be a perfect project to do together that afternoon.

We started out with spray painting the picture black.  This was easy since it was mostly black to begin with.  We just needed to cover the black and white picture part.  While this was drying we went to work finding which comic books we would be OK destroying.  After Mike gave his final approval on the pile we had made, we went to work cutting the panels.  I used my handy dandy paper cutter and Mike went to work with the scissors.

Once we had a good sized stack of panels, I grabbed the now dry painting and went to work Mod podging the panels down.  We tried to keep our favourite panels on the edges where we knew we would see them, and used various different angles and overlapped some of them to give us the look we were going for.  We then let them dry.  After that I added a single coat of Mod Podge to make sure everything was sealed down onto the wood.

Now, I had already decided which print I wanted to use a long time ago.  So I grabbed it and with Mike's help we Mod Podged it down onto the comic pages.  We used a weight to try and keep it as flat as possible and allowed it to dry.

Using the same technique I used for our wedding song lyrics, I then coated the comic pages and the print 3 times.  Making sure to allow drying time in between each coat.  There were quite a lot of bubbles underneath everything, but again taking from my experience, I knew most of these would work themselves out.  To help it along we waited for the last coat to dry and weighted the entire thing down again and left it over night.

All in all I am happy with our results, and we have a lot more comic panels, so I am already thinking up new projects to use them with!