An Artful Home

I love having art in the home and Jeff and I have quite the collection going. We've been lucky to have been gifted with some great pieces and found some lovely ones ourselves. When considering a new piece we usually go through a checklist of sorts:
- Do we like it? Why do we like it? It's more than just thinking something is pretty. Prettiness comes and goes, but if it actually makes us feel something then it's worth a second look.
- Where are we going to put it? Though this one isn't a dealbreaker we do like to have a plan in mind for where our new piece will eventually end up.
- Does it fit with the rest of the house? I'm not trying to make our entire house match (that would be cuckoo) it's more about keeping it all in the same theme - which is currently bright, fun and a little funky.

Not too long ago I revealed our master bedroom, but we weren't quite done. There was no art! It took us a little while to find the right mix of pieces. We wanted them to work with the room, but not be too matchy matchy.

First came our DIY monogrammed pictures above the headboard.

These were super simple to do. I just typed our initials and 'and' into a word document, messed around until I found some fonts we liked and then printed them. We popped them into IKEA frames and voila - instant personalized art.

[The fonts are Graf Circulum (J), Handstand (and) and Chopin (S)}

In December Jeff and I went to the One of a Kind show and we were just about to give up on finding anything we wanted to take home when we found an amazing Japanese artist who still does traditional marbling. The artist, Robert Wu, was so nice and super helpful in helping us find the perfect prints which now hang over our little reading nook.

Marbling is done one sheet at a time, so each one is unique - which I love.

Lastly, our 'gallery wall' above the dresser. Part of being art junkies is that sometimes we have more pieces than we know what to do with. This system lets us move around our current collection and add/subtract pieces when we get bored of them.

Our current collection consists of some pretty special pieces...

1. A photograph taken by Jeff's late grandfather who was an amazing photographer.
2. A painting by my bestfriend and former roommate, Carrie.
3. A photograph from our engagement shoot. Taken by the amazing Angela Y Martin.
4. Our kitty cat, Kuro.
5. Buddha. He's been with me since I moved to Toronto. This is our 4th home together.
6. I collect elephants (as well as art). This little wooden guy is from our recent trip to Dominican Republic.
7. This elephant is one of the first gifts Jeff ever bought me. He's from a little shop in Niagara on the Lake that we picked up our first summer together.
8. All our wedding mementos fit in this cute little wooden box (our invites, menu, my veil and wedding jewelry).
9. Cute converse sneakers print was a bonus from JohnWGolden's Etsy shop where we got our robot prints from (yay for freebies).

I think adding art can really personalize a home, and that's all what we're about!