There are a lot of not-so-fun parts of moving house, but it’s not all heavy lifting and phone calls. My favorite thing is having a completely blank slate to make into a space that reflects the personality of the people that live there.

I’m pretty crafty. I haven’t talked much about how it extends to our home here on what is usually a food blog, but that motivation that inspires me to make my own ketchup or pizza dough is the same one that makes me totally game to build our own bed as opposed to buying it. I love DIY and I’m really lucky that my brain seems to have the bent. Since moving in back in January, we’ve been busy, busy doing lots of projects. Based on y’all reactions to the Kiwi’s post about building our own bed (it’s had almost 20,000 views!), I don’t think y’all will mind my sharing a few of these projects with y’all. I want to give y’all the tools, inspiration, and how-to know-how to take your creativity out of the kitchen and make the rest of your home just as homemade and beautiful as your dinner.

One of these days we are going to do a tour of our whole little bungalow, but since we started in the bedroom with the bed, why don’t we hang out there for a while. Our lath and plaster, 1920s walls were just begging for some love, and while nailing into them hoping to find a stud was out of the question, going big and doing the lean was totally doable. In Bavaria, deer heads or antlers are everywhere and while we certainly aren’t gunning for Uncle Bubba’s taxidermy collection, we needed a little stag to make us feel at home. Plus I’m loving silhouettes right now, because class, so obviously this had to happen.

Rustic Stag Silhouette Wall Art Tutorial

Supply List
wood
stain
2 pieces of wood just shorter than the whole project
screws
drill
acrylic paint
brushes
stag template

I started by scrounging up some leftover bits of wood. We had just built a bed, so we had plenty of scraps laying around. I ended up using 1×3’s and a couple pieces of old siding found in my folks basement. I wanted it to be as wide as the dresser it would be sitting on which was 19 inches, so I cut my pieces to 19 inches and stacked them until I liked the height:width ratio. If you don’t have a specific size in mind try going for one of the standard picture frame sizes like 11×17 or 16×20. It doesn’t have to be exact.

Stain the wood and give it time to dry, about 24 hours.

Once dry, stack the pieces to your liking and flip the whole project over. Sit the 2 extra pieces of wood on top of the project so that it is perpendicular to the other pieces. These braces are what is going to hold the whole project together, so make sure it covers almost the length.

Use a drill to screw the braces to the wood starting at the bottom and working your way up. Make sure to put a screw into each piece of wood and at least two in one of them to prevent twistage. You also might want to pre-drill the ones at the top and bottom so that it doesn’t split like ours did. If you wanted to hang this, it would be a piece of cake to screw two eye hooks to the inside of the two pieces and run picture hanging wire between them.

Now flip it back over and let’s get that deer on there. I just free-handed it, but if that makes you a little anxious, I’ve made a template you can follow. Some  printers will do enlargements, but if yours doesn’t, you can head over to Kinkos or Staples and have them blow it up to the size of your project for about a buck.

Cut it out and lightly trace around the template then just color within the lines with your paint. Let it dry for a quick minute and voila, your very own stag silhouette art.

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