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Cheap Joe’s Art Stuff Art Blog
Tips, Tricks, Thoughts, and inspiration from across the art spectrum.
Don't Throw in the Dowel!
Hello, everybody! Here at Cheap Joe's, we love using products in unconventional ways--like spray painting area rugs or making stamps out of erasers--so it's no wonder that I looked at our stock of dowels rods and thought, "I can totally use those.
For this week's project, I emulated something I came across on Pinterest (hey, follow the Cheap Joe's Pinterest page if you don't already!) where they used buttons to create this awesome tree:
I knew that I could slice up my dowels and create a similar effect--and on a way smaller budget! To start, I stained my Joe's Prime Really Good Cradled Painting Panel with coffee because I wanted to keep the look of the wood grain, but I didn't want it quite as bright as it is when it's raw.
After several layers of application and little-to-no change in tone, I eventually just poured a huge puddle onto it and let it soak it all up. Now it smells pretty great, too!
Next, I took a handful of Joe's Prime Really Good Lightfast Acrylic colors and painted the ends of my dowels with the colors I wanted represented in my tree.
Painting the sides of the dowels saved a LOT of time later on, and also helped me remember which sizes were going to be which color!
While those were drying, I drew and cut out my tree silhouette on a heavy sheet of paper that would be easy to eventually trace around.
Once they were dry, I used a razor saw to cut slivers of my smaller dowels. This part was easily the most time-consuming, but it was kind of soothing making repetitive motions. I was in a very zen place by the end of it... If you don't want to wait as long, or if you don't find manual labor as relaxing as I do, and if you have one available, I'd recommend just using a table saw. Tip: if you end up cutting any imperfect circles, don't toss them out! They'll come in handy later!
With a pile of wood slices ready, I started painting the tops of each of them with their respective colors.
Again, painting the sides first saved me a TON of time on this step because I would have otherwise had to wait 2 drying times and get even more paint all over myself than I already did--not that that's a bad thing ;) I also went with a single thin coat because I wanted the natural wood grain to show through on my final piece. After all, I could have just used plastic circles and saved time. But the consistency of the look of wood grain throughout was very important to me.
As those dried, I cut out some little birds in one of the sheets of paper I marbled with spray paint in a past post. Yep, all three birds came from ONE sheet of paper!
I positioned them where I wanted them in my tree and then traced around them so that I'd know where I didn't need to put dowels.
I started assembling my tree with the largest dowels first since they would be the hardest to find space for. Then I glued each of them down with Rubber Cement because of its elasticity and ability to re-position my dowels if need be.
Then I began to fill in the spaces with my smaller-sized dowels.
Remember when I said not to toss your organic-shaped dowels? Here's why! They fit snugly into little nooks and crannies where a perfect circle wouldn't!
Once I had glued everything down, I noticed a glaring shininess coming from the edges and tops of some of my dowels--the Rubber Cement! Curse my sloppy hands! Thankfully, I remembered that if Rubber Cement doesn't have a second surface to bond with, it's super easy to remove!
All I had to do was take one of my blending stomps and rub it away! With everything cleaned up, I finally had this:
Sure, it's probably a little morbid that I made a tree with the remnants of its dead brethren, but it's also very pretty! I can't wait to hang this up and impress all of my friends with how perfectly and effortlessly I fit a million little dowel slices together. What have you guys done with dowel rods? Let us know!