Paint Sample Card Headboard

My son moved into an apartment last fall and I tried to give his hand me down furniture and accessories a new look.  I picked black, gray and yellow for his bedroom colors, and decided to make a headboard that looked like the paint sample cards from the home improvement stores.

First stop was the craft store to buy a few large canvases.  They had a great sale and I got 4 very large canvases for at total of $22. They had a buy one get one free sale, and I had a 50% off coupon. SCORE!!!

Actual paint sample cards

In the picture to the left of the actual paint sample cards, you can see where I tested pen colors for the paint names. The final choice was both yellow and gray.

Sample sizes of paint.  

Next stop was Home Depot.  I found the cards I wanted and then just had them give me the sample paints in each of the colors on the sample card plus one jar of white.

The sample sizes were perfect for the amount of paint I needed for this project

I painted two canvases all white.  Then I measured the canvas length wise and divided by 4. I marked off each section and used blue painters tape as the width of the white lines shown on the card. I taped the white lines off and was ready to paint. The trick to having clean lines is to paint the under color over each side of the tape first. This way if there is any bleed through the tape it will be white, and it seals the tape for the main section colors on top.
  
After the white paint had dried I painted each section following the colors on the paint cards. I painted over the edges of the blue tape so that when they were removed there would be a sharp straight line. I put several coats on each section. I really needed the extra coats on the gray and black canvas.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

 You can see in this picture that the tape marking the lines between the section colors has white paint on it and the yellow panted over top of it.

When everything was dry I removed the tape. The best part!

On the left side the tape has been removed and you can see no bleed through!

The final touch is to write the paint colors on the bottom left corner of each color section.  I used a yellow pen on the gray paint and a gray pen on the yellow paint.

Time to hang them!

 We loved the how they turned out. Looks great with our $25 Target comforter and gray and yellow sheets. As you can see, I also pained the dresser to match!