Applying what I've learned in art

It never really crossed my mind that some day all the art reading, color theory, composition, etc. was going to be useful in an applied setting other than a canvas. Well, I found that when you  need to decorate, art theory comes in quite handy. I did part of my baby’s room decoration following some lessons learned from critique I got from awesome people, and recently I applied some of that knowledge to decorating for my baby’s first birthday.

The first thing I did was to pick a theme, which helped me to define a palette. As we all know the palette can make or ruin the piece by enhancing the mood or by clashing with it. Since Ignacio loves pandas, we chose a panda party and based the colors on that concept, also because it is preferable to focus on a few colors than being all over the place we decided on black and white (panda), green for bamboo and red as contrast. After some discussing with artist friends I noticed that dark green was very Christmasy so I went for a kiwi green, which is also brighter and neutralized a bit the black.
Next step: decide location. We have the blessing of living in a good apartment complex that has a lovely park with a gazebo for us to enjoy, so we decided that the gazebo was going to be our central spot. And then we had to think of the decorations themselves… being on a budget made the choice simple: cheap stuff. You can get a lot of balloons for close to nothing and we also got a few paper fans (at $2/5 pieces) the rest was food

Decorating the trees with paper fans.

Balloons and paper fans made for a fun yet cheap decoration.

Keeping a black, white, red and green theme. The white was amply provided by the gazebo itself.

Panda cupcakes! Cream cheese for the icing, chocolate melts, chocolate chips for the nose and store bought sugar eyes.

I kept the last cupcake plain and added one red candle.

The inside of the gazebo. We finished the look with a black and white table cloth.

Some flowers to add life!