Erin Napier’s DIY Trick Makes Every Frame Look Instantly Better

HGTV star and designer Erin Napier knows how to make any space feel like home. It’s all about the layering textures, mixing patterns, and bringing in personal touches. She applied this tried-and-true design method to a set of fish prints she framed to make them that much more special, and I’m going to bet that you’ll want to do the same to every single-framed print in your house.

“Spring so far: flowers, fossils, fishes,” Napier captioned a recent Instagram post. She shared several recent snapshots from her life, including two pictures of the fish prints she framed. One slide in her carousel shows the “before” — pieces of white paper she painted watercolor stripes on — and the “after” — the fish prints in their frames with the DIY-ed stripe mats.

Adding interesting mats to vintage prints or photos is a super easy way to give your artwork a custom feel — and for basically for free at that. If you have old family photos, postcards, ticket stubs, or other ephemera lying around, you can pick up a thrifted frame, cut a piece of paper to size as a makeshift mat, and use that to paint your own background. Stripes are classic, but polka dots or a grid pattern could look really chic, too.

Then, once the paint is dry, use double-sided tape or sticky tack to adhere your picture to the backing board, either right in the middle or off-center for a more modern, eclectic look, and stick the entire thing into the frame. Voilà! Custom art in just a few minutes.

You can even use markers or colored pencils to remove drying time from the equation.

As Napier proved with this easy DIY, making your space feel more personalized doesn’t take much. Just a few minutes is all you need to customize some wall art. Your home will feel a bit more like you by the end of the day!