Paint chips, those free, colorful swatches available in the household paint section for picking the desired shade for your walls, are all over Pinterest. In a way, they are the ideal DIY material – brightly colored, easy to cut up and manipulate, and FREE.

Of course, even paint chip Pinterest projects are not free from controversy. If everyone and their Aunt Linda takes an armload of paint chips every time they visit the store, then the paint manufacturers would offset the expense of the paint chips by increasing the cost of their paint. Somebody’s gotta pay.

Prior to picking up a grand total of 4 paint chips (each with 4 color shades), I wrestled with my guilt for about 5 minutes. Unless you’re abusing the system, don’t worry about it. In the store, you don’t have to try so hard to pretend you’re actually considering painting a room in your house rather than stealing paint chips (Am I the only one who did that?). No one is going to call you out.

I chose to make the geometric triangle design, similar to this design on How About Orange.

I bought a 5 x 7 photo frame at Salvation Army. I glued my design onto a piece of white printer paper cut to fit the frame. My paint chip colors were chosen to coordinate with my bathroom rugs and shower curtain.

Cutting out the triangles was easy but time-consuming. I used previously cut triangles as a tracing template. With the size I chose, I needed to make roughly 70 triangles. In retrospect, the process would have gone faster if I had cut larger triangles so fewer were needed to fill the frame.

Takeaways

  1. Take a few paint chips without fear, but don’t get greedy.
  2. Think about the number of pieces you’ll need to cut out before starting.
  3. Enjoy an easy project that yields aesthetically pleasing art!

 

See my previous post in the Pinterest DIY Debriefing series:

DIY Debriefing: Chevron Painting