Lightly sand your wood panels to make sure they are nice and smooth and wipe down with a clean shop towel to remove all sanding dust. Create a grid on your wood panel and pencil in your lines. {you will be erasing them later so don’t be heavy handed!} The grid helps you with the sense of space and creates clean lines for you to tape off. It’s like creating your own graph paper! Pencil in your design pattern and begin taping off your design with FrogTape. Use a craft knife to trim any overlapping tape edges so that you can paint multiple sections at once.

Once you have your designs taped off, begin painting. We put two coats of paint on each of our designs and then removed the tape.

When you have finished painting and removed the tape, let your panels dry. Once the panels are good and dry go ahead and erase all of your pencil lines.

We decided to finish our panels with a coating of stain. This is an optional step, but one that we felt like really finished the panels off nicely and made them look polished and perfect! Apply the stain with a brush in the direction of the wood grain. As soon as the entire panel is covered completely, take a dry shop towel and wipe the stain off of the wood panel. These panels were unfinished wood and so they soaked up the stain, but wiping them down is still necessary to remove extra stain.

Stain takes a bit to get really dry {about 48 hours} , so make sure that your panels have time to dry completely. Once dry, attach hook and eye hardware and wire for hanging and get those beauties up on the wall!