As a painter, my husband had amassed a huge collection of old paint chips and defunct paint decks. I also had a growing collection that I held onto from years of renovating and flipping houses. I was curious to see what one could do to recycle paint chips, so I did a Pinterest search and I came across a portrait of Marilyn Monroe done completely with paint chips. The light bulb went off: what better way to immortalize my husband, than with a paint chip portrait of himself!

I started with the size of the picture frame and then scaled my picture to that size. I used photoshop to pixelate the picture and then colour matched each square. I hacked a dollar store paper cutter by adding on a ‘fence’ and cut each square needed. All the squares were stored row by row in a large medicine organizer until they were ready to be assembled.

Once I had all my paint chips cut and organized, I did a dry run on top of the backer board that came with my picture frame and glued them down. The portrait now hangs in my craft studio and I get to enjoy my husband’s smiling face whenever I’m crafting! This DIY is shared on my blog site so other crafters can duplicate it.