La Loteria

Back when I went to visit my friend Alex in San Antonio in May, I picked up some great new art.  You've already met Zelda the Pig:

The other stuff I got is art based on this Mexican version of Bingo called "Loteria." 

I saw it in the same store that we found Zelda, and knew I had to get some.  There were a ton of different pictures to choose from - the question was which ones!  I originally thought I'd get them to go in my bathroom, so I was looking for something with the greens and blues in the shower curtain, so these are the ones I picked out.

These all had the colors I liked, and I also got a kick out of getting a couple that had instruments in them.  And I like frogs.  Not sure why I got the scorpion except that I really loved the yellow background.

Well, when I got them home and started playing around with them, it just didn't quite make sense in the bathroom.  It wasn't terrible, but I think with all the color it just felt a little too "fiesta" for me in there.  So I did what I always do, which was to sit around and stare at it for a while.  And this time, it was like...months.  I just couldn't make a decision - I knew I wanted to have them somewhere in the house, but couldn't figure out where the best place for them was.  Leave it to someone else to figure it out! 

My friend Ellen came over to check things out, and helpfully suggested that they might look nice against the green wall in the dining area and kitchen.  There's a big wall where this art was:

Eventually...after delaying a while longer...I finally took care of trying out Ellen's suggestion today.  My first roadblock was that 3 of the 4 pictures had the same frame and were the same size, but one (my beloved frog), was a slightly different shade of wood and slightly smaller in the frame.  Here you can see the difference:

My original plan had been to make it a 2x2 postage stamp kind of arrangement, but that clearly wouldn't work any longer if one of these things was not like the other.  I cut out some paper versions of all four of them, and played around with other arrangements on the wall.  I tried a bunch of stuff, including trying to figure out whether I could hang 3 of them together, and the last one somewhere else, but finally I stumbled on an arrangement I liked.

This one had the advantage of distracting the eye a little bit from the odd-man-out frame, and didn't draw too much attention to its different size, so I thought it was a good solution, and was a little bit more interesting to look at anyway.

So my next two projects are to spackle over some of the old nail holes in the green wall...

...and then to find a new home for the pictures that were previously there.  More on that next time!