How to make wall art for your bedroom that costs practically nothing

I've been looking with dismay at our grotty looking bed cover for a while, so I was extremely happy this week to combine a mid-year sale at a local bed-linen-selling establishment with a 'come visit our new store' discount voucher, and get a a total bargain on the prettiest ever blue and white doona cover.

New bed linen makes me happy. It also makes me want to make the bed. This is a good thing.

Of course, it also meant that the wall art I made the last time we had a bedroom reinvention didn't match. I'd have to do something else. 

Now, I am cheap. I genuinely do have Scottish ancestry - and it shows. I don't want to pay for stuff that I can make myself, and I decided that I could make something decorative for our wall. I mean, I've been to the Museum of Contemporary Art, right? Those guys whack some paint on a canvas with rough edges and heaven knows what else, and someone pays them for it. If they can do it, so can I.

I began in the best place - with what I already had. Eight years ago I covered three medium sized cheap painting canvases with cheerful tie-dyed fabric (made at a very fun class, as I recall) to put up in the dining room. Two years later I got sick of the tie-dye and covered it over with fabric that went with the (then) new bedroom, and today, I pulled both layers of fabric off and stripped them right back to the original white canvases.

Next, I checked out the designs on the bed linen. The flowers looked hand-drawn, and I'm a good copier, so I decided I'd sketch a different flower from the new linen onto each canvas, using the same colours, but making each one bigger than in the printed fabric.

I sketched a rough outline in pencil, and then used a simple permanent marker - in blue ink - going over the lines. It really wasn't that flash. Hand-drawn, naive designs are great: you really can't get them wrong. Next I added a few embellishes in black permanent marker, just to add some depth to the colour.

Finally, I pulled out the kids' paint container, found two shades of blue and two paintbrushes, and set to work, roughly painting in some areas. It didn't have to be tidy or fabulous - the design on the doona cover is a bit rough and ready, and I just followed its example.

Once they were dry, they went up on the wall.

Et voila. New bedroom wall art for literally no cost. If you did something similar, the most you'd pay would be for the canvases, the pens and the paint, but it's quite likely most of us would have a lot of that in a cupboard somewhere.