DIY Easy Art

I've been wanting to make something to take up some wall space in my living room for a while.  There is a nipple (that's the best way I can think of to describe it) for hanging something on the wall.  Instead of taking it out and patching the hole before painting, I just left it.  Bad decision.  It is too high up on the wall for a normal sized picture to fill the space well.  I made this "art" to try and fill the space, but I think that even its large size doesn't make up for its overly-high placement.

I'm sure you've seen this done before.  So did I!  That's why I made it.  I like the look of the quotation art that's on everyone else's wall and I wanted some too!  Now that I have it, I'm not so sure it was the right way to go.  A small quotation piece looks cute along with a variety of other art all hung together.  A ginormous quotation piece just looks like it's missing something.  Oh well, here it is anyway:

Here's how I did it.  I started with this large painting (I use that term loosely, it is printed on a thin board) that I got at a church rummage sale for $3.

The frame was pretty awful, so I started with that.  First I cleaned it, and the entire picture, with wet rags.

Then I primed the frame.

Then I painted a couple of coats of dark grey on the frame, an improvement from the weird gold marbleized pattern that had been there originally.

Next I chose my fonts and cut my REM quote out of contact paper.  Some bad choices were made here, as well.  First of all, my quote is so long that I had to use a smaller font to fit it all.  I think it would have looked nicer with more of the painting showing through, so a shorter quote with larger font would have looked better.  Also, clear contact paper was not the best idea.  Try placing your quote on a picture when you can't see the letter you are placing clearly, let alone the ones you've already stuck to the picture!  Anyway, that's how I did it but I suggest you not follow my example!  Here's the mess that was left over after cutting all the letters out:

I then used painters tape to hopefully keep the lines even and level.

I placed the letters (which still had their backing on so you can see them) in order to get a feeling on how well they fit.  Then I went on to the painful process of trying to stick my letters to the picture in a somewhat straight manner (with dubious success).  I'd show you a picture of this, but you can't see the letters so it would not look like much!  I peeled off the painters tape and covered the entire thing with two quick coats of a very light yellow I had on hand.  I was worried about how it would look when I peeled off the letters, but they were relatively un-smudged and the contact paper was very easy to remove.

I had to do some touch-up of the frame, and then finally hung it on the wall!  It's nice to have up there, but I feel like maybe I should add something to the bottom left corner.  What do you think?

Here it is again, a little wonky but finished!