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Are you sick of me and my obsession with Pinterest yet? One of the hot items this summer (meaning a lot of people pinned these so they came up over and over) was subway art. There were art pieces with all the different addresses people had lived at, or others used quotes and words to live by. I read a ton of tutorials on how to make these because I was intrigued and had just the perfect spot for my own piece.
Ugh! Most of the tutorials had these crafty folks using a $3000 vinyl cutting machine OR they printed all the letters onto vinyl and used a blade to cut them out. Are you kidding me? I have no attention to detail and it would drive me nuts to try and cut everything out by hand. (Clearly it also isn’t worth investing in a machine either!) I was convinced there must be another way. These tutorials also involved multiple layers of paint and peeling of vinyl. Way too many steps for me.
What I did was use my trusty Photoshop Elements to design what I wanted. Then I called my friend Matthew, over at NW Fine Art Printing. Matthew had been printing my photo canvases for a couple of months, but I knew that they had machines that printed on all sorts of services. I emailed him and asked him what the best medium would be thinking maybe canvas or aluminum. I was so pleased when he said plywood. That was EXACTLY what I wanted!
He asked me to make my file into vector art. I’m really not sure what that is but I knew folks that had Adobe Illustrator and even full versions of Photoshop that could do this. I sent him the art and about a week later I picked up this thing of beauty.
I love it! I included all the things that are important to us. Kids, dogs, Dawgs, hometowns, last names, favorite vacation spots, anniversary, etc. My finished piece is 22 inches by 45 inches and it fits perfectly at the top of my stairs.
Want to make one for yourself? I asked Matthew if he would do this sort of thing for other folks and he said he would. And they are quite reasonable. You can email him through their website or shoot me an email and I will put you in contact with him. You just can’t beat making this little piece of history for yourself!