Deer Head String Art

Yes, good old string art seems to have made a resurgence. I remember doing it as a craft in grade school in the early 80’s. Of course today’s version is more chic and sophisticated than the stuff we came up with back then, right?

Whatever the case, I have a blank wall in the living room that has been begging for some décor for a long time so a quick search of Pinterest gave me the idea of creating a deer head silhouette in string art style.

I found a 1.5 x 2 foot piece of plywood in the garage and gave it a base coat of black, then “washed” it with a layer of watered-down red craft paint, followed by the same treatment in blue, for a rustic, weathered look.

Next I sketched out a deer head silhouette in CorelDraw and tile printed it on four pages to be properly scaled for the wood.

The tutorials I found online called for linoleum nails but the closest thing I could find in my local hardware store were called escutcheon pins, which are apparently decorative nails used for things like jewellery boxes. Since they looked pretty and were close to the shape of linoleum nails I bought them and brought them home to outline my deer.

Once I had hammered in the nails around the outline (about a pinkie’s width apart), I removed the template. Some little pieces of paper stuck under a few of the nails so I removed these with tweezers.

I chose to use ecru embroidery floss for my string. It stood out nicely against the dark background and went well with the brass nails. I used a thickness of three strands of floss and ended up going through about one and a half skeins.

Here’s the work in progress. Wrapping the string was the hardest part of the process, not because it was hard to lay out a pattern — you really can’t go wrong there — but because the threads would often slip off the nail heads. It was also tricky tying off tightly at the end of a length of floss.

Here’s the final project. I was happy with the result. I love the look of the geometric lines created by the string and the little golden glitter that comes from the nail heads.