How to make State Art in a floating frame

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I am slowly creating pieces for a gallery wall in our downstairs hallway – all part of trying to bring in some color and cover some of our white walls. I had seen this state art on Pinterest and decided that it would be a fun piece to include in the hallway.

For this piece, I decided to do Minnesota for my husband, Iowa for where we met at college, and Illinois for where I grew up and where we live now. If there had been enough space, I would of added Missouri where I was born.

I used reference maps and found the images of the maps here. I sized them for the frame using Photoshop but would have just done this in Word in the past. Then I just printed them on plain white cardstock. You can see the states as they look after I printed them. The frame is a floater frame from Target.

I always use a cutting board when I cut out shapes with an Exacto knife to protect the surface of wherever I am working.
Before I cut with the blade, I roughly cut out the shape using scissors. My goal for this is to have less paper to deal with when I am using the blade.

If you look closely, you can see that I do little pieces at a time. Cutting the states out along the rivers was a little tricky, so I cut small little pieces at a time with the different little notches in the river.

Here is Illinois all cut out.
Lastly, I decided to add the hearts over the cities that mean the most to us in those states. I forgot to take a picture of this step, but I am horrible at free-handing hearts, so I printed three little hearts using Microsoft Word clip art onto red cardstock and cut them out using my blade.

Then, I attached the states onto the bottom layer of the glass using a rolled up piece of scotch tape.

Here is the finished product! I am really happy with the way it turned out, and it took me less than an hour to finish (and that is with me being very particular about cutting out the states). When I finally finish my gallery wall and get this hung up, I will post an updated picture. For now, it will just keep sitting on my book shelf in the office.

 

A few updated pictures:
framed state art
framed state art

Comments

  1. Kayla Anderson says

    Aww, cute! Thanks for linking to my blog so I could find yours 🙂 I always love seeing other peoples’ take on the Map Art! I had no idea Target sells float frames too- I always get mine at Michael’s. Thanks for the heads up!

    -Kayla
    kayladanelle.com

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