Pool Table Room Progress and DIY Digital Watercolor Art (With Cats)

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With my 'meh' feelings lately about our living room, we've instead been concentrating on our family room downstairs, aka the pool table room, aka a fun place to entertain inside with air conditioning.

We had a ton of boxes still in here from when the movers unloaded them, so we took some time to organize them and move most of them to our workroom/storage room/laundry room. We finally started moving our old, ugly and stained full of character chairs, coffee table and end tables from our college apartment into place, and it actually started feeling like a room. But since we had to wait for my BIL to come over to help move the slate for the pool table (the three slabs weigh about 175 pounds each, so we definitely needed help with them!), we started hanging some of the wall decor we'd had at our last house.

(My husband hanging a picture behind where the pool table will live. Yes, we used more Command hooks to hang these, but we haven't had any problems except with the one frame in our living room. We also moved all of the track lighting on the ceiling so it will be concentrated above the pool table)

He also hung these abstract canvas wraps, which I really love since they're a great representation of the color scheme in the pool table: crimson with mocha, beige, grey, and black. Our pool table felt is even the perfect shade of Washington State crimson, since it was a brand new table we bought from a distributor about 4 years ago, and we got to customize it by picking the felt color, wood finish color and leg style.

But since our new pool table room is a bit bigger than at our old house, I needed some new art for the far walls on the other side of the room, to flank the sliding door to our back patio.

(This is actually progress! There were was no furniture, just piles of boxes everywhere a few hours before.)

I already had some black frames with matting that would hold three 5 x 7 photos vertically, so I decided to create my own art to hang. And I'd been waiting for an excuse to feature some photos of the rest of our family (aka, our cats), so this was the perfect opportunity.

I started by searching Google images for images from screen savers and computer backgrounds that stood out to me, and fit the color scheme represented in the canvas wrap art we'd just hung. Once I'd found six backgrounds that I liked, I imported them into Illustrator, two at a time so I could print them as 5" x 7" images on 8.5" x 11" photo paper.

I then took the cat photos from this post, and cut out the backgrounds in Photoshop (making sure to feather the cat photo by a couple pixels before cutting it out, so it will blend well once placed). I saved the cat photos as PNGs, then opened them in Illustrator and pasted them on top of the backgrounds I'd found on Google.



Now wait, just cats on abstract backgrounds wasn't what I was going for--I wanted watercolor art!

And so I selected both the cat image and the background image, and after playing around with the watercolor effect a bit, I got grainy, painted looking kitties that now blended into their background.

Here are the printed versions, it's a little easier to see the watercolor effect on the paper.

After printing the 5" x 7" photos, I cut them out and mounted them to the matting I already had. And I discovered something kinda interesting, apparently my photo paper is a bit transparent when held up to light, as you can see in the below photos. Glowing kittehs! I wonder if I could do something else with lighting and this semi-transparent photo paper, hmmm....

And the hung digital cat watercolor photos.

(I just noticed when looking at this photo that the frames don't seem to fill the space on the wall as well as they do in real life. I think it's because the shades of the floor lamps are all washed out, so you can't see how big they are.)

Once we got some color on the walls at that end of the room, some quicky decorations up on the fireplace mantel, and my BIL came by to help with the pool table slate, the room is slowly starting to come together.

(I do sort of wish the full brick wall that the fireplace is on had been left unpainted for a fun, urban feel, but oh well!)

We still need to get rid of some junk, hang some curtains (and make/buy said curtains), and hang a print we got for our wedding (once I put it in it's new frame), and finish putting together the pool table, but hopefully that won't be to much more work. And it will be worth it, because then we can start entertaining, or at least have my BIL and his wife over for a few games of pool.  I can't wait to have an entertaining space again, especially since it's getting so hot out on our deck and back patio!

Do you have an "entertaining space" in your home?