Giveaway: Windows 8 Tablet, Keyboard Dock and Stylus Brush

So many of you mentioned yesterday that you were dying to get your hands on the Fresh Paint app yourself. Well, here's your chance! The Fresh Paint team provided me with a tablet with the Windows 8 software, a keyboard dock (making your tablet basically a fully functioning laptop), and a really cool stylus brush to give away so you can create your own masterpieces in Fresh Paint.

(one of my recent Fresh Paint creations - I'm loving this app!)

So to enter to win the tablet, keyboard and brush stylus, please leave a comment on this post, sharing what type of painting projects you'd try with the Fresh Paint app. Abstracts? Portraits? Hoping to import a photo in using the "wet paint" function? Feel free to link to inspiration images. We'd love to see!

***This just in! CanvasPop is throwing in a free 12x18 custom canvas print of your masterpiece as part of the give away. How's that for sweetening the pot? :)

Contest ends Sunday May 5 at midnight. I've opened up the comments to allow for unregistered users. The winner will be emailed so please be sure to leave you email address if you're not signed in. Good luck!

Playing with Fresh Paint

I was thrilled when Microsoft reached out to me about trying out a new app called Fresh Paint they developed for their Windows 8 touch screen device. Fresh Paint was first introduced in MoMa's Material's Lab, and was met with high acclaim. I was also totally blown away by the realistic look of the painting application.To practice I referenced this painting and tried my first go-round. Here's the base:And here's the finished version:And my second try, with apples:The dimension of the strokes looks a lot like real oil paint, right? Like any more involved app, it takes some time to figure out how everything works, but after three or four paintings, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on how to use all the functions. I like "real" painting a lot, but it is so much work to pull out all my oils and make a huge mess and then there's the clean up with all those chemicals, not to mention waiting around for a week for the paint to dry. I love that with Fresh Paint, I could make a painting in like 20 minutes while I'm lounging on the sofa. Such a relaxer!So once I felt like I had the hang of painting with the app and the brush stylus, I tried Fresh Paint's cool feature where you can import any image and the colors become wet paint, so you can manipulate the image and make it look painted. It's like advanced doodling - no creativity or brain work required! So, so awesome.Since Mother's Day is around the corner, I decided I wanted to use the app to make something special for my Mom (and she already saw the painting, so I'm not blowing any surprises here.) :) I've talked about my Grandma Johnson before, who immigrated from Sweden when she was 19. This photo has always been my favorite of her. It was taken just before they left their home to move to the US.Grandma Johnson lived to be more than 100 years old. She was independent, headstrong, lovely, intelligent, creative, and loving. We all think of her as the matriarch of our huge family. One of the first and most memorable things we've done since moving to New York was to go to Ellis Island when my parents were in town visiting. We were able to check the scans of the ships' logs to see Grandma's and her parents' signatures. It was really amazing.I thought it would be fun to see if I could use Fresh Paint to paint on top of the old photo scan and recreate a loose, more abstract and painterly version of the photo in color. To do this, you import the photo in the same way as the "wet paint" method, but this time I layered paint color on top of the black and white image, just using the photo as a sort of template. I liked getting to guess what color her clothes would have been, and it was fun to add color to the room through the rug, wallpaper and furniture.I think the thing that makes the Fresh Paint app so realistic is the seemingly infinite color possibilities. Every shade you could ever dream up is right at your finger tips.   The brush stylus makes the process feel so real. I was able to smooth out her face and add in more detail in the room. And here's the finished painting. I love that it's not a perfect replica of the photo. This actually looks a lot more like Grandma did as an older adult, which makes me really happy. This is more like how I remember her.I had two of the finished images printed on heavy cardstock at my local printers for $2 each (talk about affordable art!). I'm giving a framed one to my mom for Mother's Day, and the other I framed in one of my favorite antique frames and hung in my girls' room.My girls know all about Grandma Johnson and how special she was to me, and I love that they get to see her photo every day in their room. I can't wait to keep practicing with the Fresh Paint app! I've already got a whole folder of images on my desktop that I'm so excited to paint over and print out. :)This post was sponsored by Microsoft's Fresh Paint app, available exclusively on Windows 8. All opinions are my own. 

Chelsea Gray Mirrored Cabinets

Want to hear what my new favorite idea is for painting furniture?

If you're stuck on choosing what color to paint a cabinet or a bookshelf, try going with the wall color. Especially if your walls are a more dramatic color (this trick is a lot less fun if your walls are a very pale neutral or white).

I tried it first here in my office and then two more times with different client projects, and I'm just floored every time at how much I like the look. When furniture matches the wall color it gives the space texture but doesn't break up the flow of the room in the way that contrasting colors can.

I almost sold these fretwork cabinets a couple months ago because I was bored with them, but they really are the perfect size for my office and they provide some much-needed storage (as seen here). Painting them the color of the walls (BM's Chelsea Gray) gave them a second life for me, and now I'm glad I held onto them a little longer. Man, I've got to stop flying through furniture so fast! Do you get sick of stuff like I do? My furniture attention span is shrinking like crazy the longer I'm in this business.

(PS I lightly sanded the old paint job before brushing on the new coat of gray paint. I used a paint+primer formula, so I didn't bother to prime first. And I didn't use even an inch of painter's tape on all those tricky fretwork pieces because this totally works every time.)

HAPPY WEEKEND! xoxo

A Breath of Fresh Air in the Kitchen

My friends over at One Kings Lane were so kind to share photos of this amazing kitchen redo they posted on the OKL blog this week (they even sent me over some outtakes). Isn't this soft blue-gray color perfection? Such a contrast from the before images!

The kitchen belongs to OKL editor Kerstin Czarra. She and stylist Megan Phlug worked together to completely transform this small NYC kitchen with just a little paint, new brass hardware and a few really well-chosen accessories. Not to mention some new lighting, including this chandelier that they made themselves! Amazing, right? Also, that moulding is completely unreal.

Here are a few more photos of the gorgeous, airy space:

Megan chose these cork floor tiles because they look a lot like marbleized paper. So pretty!

Adding a mirrored backsplash and taking off the upper cabinet doors really lightened up the space.

Can you believe how much just a little paint completely transformed this kitchen? For more photos and info on this fabulous project, check out the One Kings Lane blog here. Thanks for sharing, and great job, ladies!

Rustoleum Enamel

Are you sick of me professing my love of oil-based paints yet? :) When I want a custom color mixed, I use Benjamin Moore's or Sherwin-Williams' Porch and Floor paint, but if I'm at Home Depot and need a pretty basic color, I reach for the quarts of pre-mixed Rustoleum Enamel.

I've used their blue:

Red:

White:

Black:

and Gray:

Eileen from A Creative Day was adventurous and tried out the Hunter Green Rustoleum recently and emailed me the results. Check out this beautiful color!

I'm itching to use it myself now! Such a pretty shade of emerald!

Brass-Plated Industrial Shelving

How amazing are these brass-plated industrial shelves?

Windsor Smith had these run-of-the-mill hardware store metal shelves plated for Tracy Anderson's new flagship studio (the whole place is incredible).  It looks like she used something similar to these $90 shelves and replaced the MDF with marble and added casters. 

I know I'd definitely get my laundry done more often with a pair of these next to my washer/dryer. :)

New Headboard for the Master Bedroom

I've been planning on making my own upholstered headboard for our bedroom for a while now, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Then recently I was looking on Wayfair for frameless mirrors for a project when I stumbled across this headboard. It was less than $250 for a queen, which is not a whole lot more than the cost of supplies for making my own tufted headboard.

I was seriously so impressed with the quality of the headboard when it arrived. I thought I would have to mount it on the wall like some of the cheapy ones out there, but this one comes with two height-adjustable legs, which is great because it's a pretty heavy piece. The color is a sort of khaki brown (a little more olive than these photos). I actually don't mind the color in the room, but I bought a couple of yards of this deep oxblood velvet remnant from my upholsterer, and I'm thinking it would be a breeze to recover this thing in like an afternoon.

I was wearing one of my favorite nail polish colors (Essie's Wicked) when I bought the velvet and my upholsterer was like, "soooooo... you really like this color, don't you?" #awkward

The color is pretty in here though, right? With a brighter brass on the nailhead I think. Or maybe polished nickel nailhead...

Sending Love

I'm sure you've been glued to the computer and television like I have. (Checking Reddit until 3am? Yeah, me too.) My heart aches for my poor Boston. I hope you all are staying safe, especially our old Cambridge friends. We're all praying and hoping here that this lock down ends soon. I hate seeing all those so-familiar places as the setting of such scary circumstances, but I know you guys will continue to pull together. There's no tougher city than Boston. xo

Inexpensive Black Lamp Shades

I love black lamp shades best, but seriously, who wants to pay $50-100 for a largish drum shade? Not I. The good news is these $16 white shades from Target take paint really well.

I was in a time crunch, and didn't have the right black spray paint on hand (like I thought I did), so I sprayed the shades with oil-rubbed bronze paint first, which made it really easy to cover the inside of the shade well.

The spray paint worked on the outer fabric wrap too, but it was a little trickier to get the saturation  just right. 

I did a light sanding after the spray paint dried, just to get any of the loose stuff off and and to smooth out drips. And then I lightly brushed on some black screen printing paint, which I'm learning is the best type of fabric paint around.

And I ended with a final light sanding.

It ended up being a lucky surprise how much I like the way the oil-rubbed bronze and the matte black paint finishes work together! Not at all sparkly like oil-rubbed bronze paint can sometimes be, but just enough of a sheen to look nice and, well, not spray painted. :)

Besides the obvious cost savings, fabric shades are much more durable. Paper shades start to show their wear after a couple years of being in a house with kids and moving a few times. And I think these look almost as good in person as a $120 shade from Just Shades (my favorite splurge shade source).