Arise and Shine Forth - Wall Art DIY

How about some quick and easy DIY wall art?  Here I used a passage of scripture, but you could just as easily use your favorite song lyric or a name or just about anything you like.

Our theme for the Young Women and Young Men at church this year is "Arise and Shine Forth, which is take from this scripture: "Verily I say unto you all: Arise and shine forth, that thy light may be a standard for the nations;"
Doctrine and Covenants 115:5

I got the idea from a Pinterest DIY Song Lyric Wall Art post.  The original post Song Lyric Wall Art/D.I.Y. Project with tutorial is posted by A Beautiful Mess.

Instead of using oil paintings as shown in the tutorial, I chose 8"x10" pictures mounted on wooden plaques available at Dollar Tree.  My dear friend RB used her amazing skills with the Cricut to print out the letters and art for me.  I bought a can of Clear Flat Krylon Acrylic Spray Paint and sprayed two coats on the face of the plaque before sticking on the letters so that the sticky stuff wouldn't tear the paper picture.  Worked like a charm.  This is the first one I made, and I used Flat White Krylon Acrylic Spray Paint to paint over everything once the letters were applied.  It didn't work as well as I thought.  The flat white balls up really bad and leaves a chalky residue.  Hard to explain, but next time I'll use White Acrylic Craft paint from Walmart.  It is more affordable and won't be so hard to work with.  

Here is a before and after of the second one I did.  White Gloss Acrylic Craft Paint worked great.  The only downside for this paint is that it goes on wetter and might bleed through your letters a bit.  The spray paint goes on drier.

It is a fun project that can be completed in about three hours.  If you spray the plaques with the Clear Krylon ahead of time, then you'll save about 30 minutes to an hour of time.  The day I painted the first one was quite warm, so my paint dried in 10 minutes flat.  I painted it outside on my front porch.  The second one I painted with a sponge brush and used my hair dryer to speed up the drying time between coats of paint. 

Our Young Women group made some of these during a weeknight church activity.  If you make one, tell me about it.  Send a me photo and/or comment and perhaps I can update this post with your creations.