Tennis Ball Painting

A while back the boy and I started a painting. We got the 4’ x 3’ canvas from Michael's with the intention of painting a rainy city scene using nothing but the materials in the garage. Like any DIYr’s garage, mine has an embarrassment of riches of stuff for the project, assuming that you can replace the word “riches” with “one eighth to one quarter filled paint cans” and “embarrassment” with “embarrassment”.  I figured it’d be a fun project like our last set of paintings.

For whatever reason, the vision wasn't there and the makeshift easel I knocked together held the 15% finished project for many, many months.  Eventually, I got tired of staring at it and even more tired of moving it out of the way every time I had to drag the mower out to do yardwork. Something had to be done, but what, exactly?

Looking over at my seven year old’s  wagon filled with sports stuff gave me an idea for how to put lipstick on this pig and finally recover some precious real estate in the garage. First, I painted over the dumb and boring and awful and crummy city scene with five coats of white paint.  Next, I extricated all of the spider webs and spider corpses from the easel and completely dismantled it. Then, using those pieces (well… mostly) I built a temporary frame for the canvas that had handles that would allow two people to carry it with the canvas facing up. Also, the frame had tall borders that would prevent anything that was sitting on the now-face-up canvas from falling off.

Weird, right?  Well, here’s where the inspiration to use the sports stuff comes into play. Since my son plays tennis the only things that outnumber the nearly empty paint cans and spider ghosts in the garage are old tennis balls.  We dipped a tennis ball into some paint then placed the ball on the canvas.  We took the canvas by the handles and rolled it back and forth until the “paintbrush” ran out of paint.

To avoid smearing the tracks we limited ourselves to one color per day. We also limited ourselves to five colors to keep it simple. The red is oil-based exterior paint, the yellow is poster paint, and the orange, green, and blue are acrylics. I put a temporary border 2/3 down the painting to limit the range of the blue (top part) and green (bottom part) to give the work a sunrise-y sort of feel.

After the final coat (15 total coats, I think) was done I once again dismantled the frame and used those parts (again… mostly) to build the actual picture frame. I painted it black to make the colors pop. There it is hanging in our guest bedroom.

 If all goes as planned it will be in a local art showing starting this weekend.  If not, well, the guest bedroom wall is a perfectly fine place for it. The Louvre can wait.