One Picture Inspiring All Sorts of Creative Projects!

Every once in awhile I see a picture or image that inspires me to make a collage. Oftentimes these inspirational images are on interior design websites, which I find creatively stimulating. One of my favorite design sites is style files, which is chock-full of photos of beautiful and unique interior designs.

I've let images from style files inspire collages before - like this one:


Which inspired this collage:

Most recently, I came upon this image on style files:


And fell in love with the color scheme! I immediately knew that I wanted to make a collage, a manicure and a painting all based around this picture!

One of those three projects has been completed so far - the manicure! Check out the below pictures for the colors I used, and the final product:

.   orly - bailamos / essie - mojito madness / orly - preamp / love&beauty - mint /
sinful colors - snow me white / l.a. colors - green tea  .

.  thumbnail is sinful colors snow me white with one coat of l.a. colors green tea on top  .

Here is step one of the collage that I'll make:

.  collage project, stage one  .

First I go through magazines as well as my stash of magazine tear-outs and select images that will possibly make it into my collage. In this case, I had a handful of specific colors I was looking for, so I tried to find as many different textures of those colors as I could. I sorted them into stacks by color, as you can see.

Next I'll arrange them onto posterboard that I've pre-cut to sizes like 11x14, 4x6, and 5x7, until I find arrangements that I love. Then I'll glue them down and frame them! If you look in the upper left of the above image you can see that I've started doing some arranging already, very preliminarily. I'll definitely blog about it when I'm finishing up this project - hopefully within the next couple of weeks!

Finally I hope to paint a version of the picture, using canvas and acrylic paints. Last spring I took a painting class with my friends Steph and Kara at a fun place called the Paint Bar in Newton, MA, where we painted these:

.  fake boston skyline  . 

And it kind of inspired me to start painting more, even though it's been over a year and a half since I went to the Paint Bar and I've only painted like 3.5 things since. So hopefully that style files picture will be my next painting endeavor, and I'll blog about that for sure if/when I actually get around to it!

 Do you like to be crafty? What is your favorite creative outlet?