Dining Room Art: Eat, Drink & Be Merry

Remember this little guy that I made for the kitchen?

Well, he was my practice run for doing bigger pieces for this wall in the dining room:

Ya'll know how I love 3D art, especially when it involves wooden letters on canvas. I thought this wall sort of screamed for three bigger canvases, so I decided to go with an "Eat, Drink and Be Merry" theme. I chose 16x20 canvases, and played around with different letters in the store. After much playing, I decided to use different letters for each word - mainly because of the different word lengths I was working with. "Be Merry" would only fit in a certain letter size,  but I didn't want to use that letter size for everything. So - three different types of letters is what I came home with, hoping for the best. 

Into the garage they went (except for "drink" - those letters were already white). I gave them a few more coats than last time, so they were good and white and glossy before I brought them back in. I laid them out on the dining room table, and started playing around with different arrangements. First, I centered everything:

 But it wasn't really doing it for me. So I tried doing "drink" in a diagonal. 

 
No thanks. Finally, I moved everything to the lower, left-hand corner. 

And we have a winner! The "Be Merry" arrangement sold me on it. Out came the glue...

 ...and all these guys were secured into place. I got their final placement down, and then I weighted down the letters to speed up their drying time. Once I was confident there wouldn't be any letter-slippage, I took them into the garage one by one for some more spray paint lovin'. 

 While I let them dry (which was an all-afternoon process), I used some still-blank 16x20 canvases to measure and place my nail hangers. I'm not really much of a "measuring" type - I'm much more fond of eye-balling. And luckily...

...it usually works for me. Success!

Once all three were dry to the touch, I brought them inside and let them dry a few more hours on the dining room table (away from the humidity we have going on today.) And finally, up they went. 

I really like them, but I'm going back and forth on whether I like the scale of them. I thought this canvas size was going to be perfect for that wall, but I feel like they're a little swamped in a sea of (lovely) Antique Silver paint. First, I thought I could do additional, smaller-sized canvases around the main three and go for a sort of gallery-wall effect. I tried it on the computer first:

And I do believe we have a major fail. I like the three by themselves a helluva lot more than I like the way that looks. So instead, I'm going to start thinking of ideas for dining room curtains. If I hang them right, I think they'll really help balance the wall out. Not to mention making my windows look a bit less pathetic. Now the question, of course, is the ol' to buy or to sew conundrum? But alas, it's a conundrum for another day. Happy Weekend!