LIGHTING AS A PAINTBRUSH, AND USING WALLS, FLOORS, AND CABINETS, AS A CANVAS
@ExplosiveControlArt
As an artist, I don’t use the typical components that you may associate with interior design.
Painting with Lighting for instance is a great inexpensive way to add interest and depth to a room. I show a dramatic example when I turned our home in to a nightclub (Nico’s nightclub) for our daughter’s 16th birthday a few years ago, with my purple and pink up-lights set on the floor, and white curtain string lights. Another simple way to add dramatic lighting indoors or outdoors, is colored light bulbs, it can change a simple nightlight into a work of art.
Another example, is faux marble and tile painting, both interior and exterior.
I painted a faux marble design inside two art niches indoors, and cut wood molding with a $5 miter box and a hand saw to frame the niches and door, and painted it metallic gold, which gets a cool patina over the years. I put stone statues inside, to dramatically change a white plain empty niche, into a showpiece.
I painted a medallion and tile pattern on a boring grey concrete floor outdoors, only thing is, I have to touch it up a couple times a year, but it looks great.
I painted black and white squares on counters, window sills, and an archway indoors, long before the black and white squares of Mackenzie Childs became so popular. (I also used a miter box and hand saw to make the wood columns around the arch)
It’s only paint, don’t be afraid to use the walls and floors themselves as a canvas.
Cabinets can also be used as a canvas. When we first moved into our home over 25 years ago, the kitchen cabinets were very boring and beige, but replacing cabinets is one of most expensive things when building or remodeling a kitchen, and that wasn’t an option. So I stained the trim moulding to give it more depth, and trimmed some of the molding with metallic gold paint, but then I saw that each square on the island looked like an empty frame needing to be filled. I used wallpaper glue to put posters of fine art, caulked around the border, and painted a few coats of water base polyurethane to seal it. On one side wall I put a tall lemon tree, and used 18 pieces of paper I trimmed seamlessly to look like one continuous image. I didn’t do all the cabinets that would be too much, just the center Island and some sidewalls, for a very custom inexpensive look!