The art is pretty and all, but I WANT MY METRO BACK!

So, I'm back at UT (graduation is 325 day away!) and there are quite a few changes from when I was a freshman 10 years ago.  One of the most heartbreaking is the loss of Metro.  Metro was this all night coffee shop right on the Drag that was old, gross, cheap and my absolute favorite place on campus.  In high school all of my friends and I would hang out there (for hours with one cup of coffee, I'm sure they loved us) and when I lived in the dorms it was my go-to all nighter spot.   A few years ago, they replaced it with some place called Caffe' Medici.  It's fine and whatever, but (in case you can't tell) I have a bit of a grudge with the place for replacing my beloved Metro and their magical chocolate banana milkshakes.  For some reason this week, I decided to do a bit of studying there and while the soy mocha wasn't anything to write home about, I found a bit of design inspiration hanging on the wall.

On their website, it says that this is an ongoing installation, where they are giving the same image/paper (the dude drinking coffee from their logo) to their customers and local artists.  The whole thing looks like it's just hung up with binder clips and seems like it would be pretty easy to recreate.

This might be really easy if you've got some artistic friends to help (you could do it yourself, but I like the mix of styles that you see here.)  Just find a black and white image, print it on some sturdy paper and get to colorin'!  Hang them in rows with the binder rings and you've got a totally customizable piece of art.  It seems like they nailed a piece of wood at the top and hung/nailed the rows to that.  The inch or so that it's off the wall gives it a little bit of dimension and lets the binder rings hang flat.  It's perfect for a weird/large area of wall space that needs to be covered and I'm pretty sure it could be done for under $10.  (Printing 20 or 30 at Kinko's on some card stock, a package of binder rings and a couple of feet of 1X2?  Nice.)

Now, call me a genius, but I also LOVE the idea with children's artwork.  Make the image something pretty graphic and clean (because children's artwork usually is a bit all over the place - "organic" if you will) to balance the drawing/painting.  Pick the colors the kids can play with and let them go to town.  I think it would be a fantastic piece for the living room, over the couch.  Oversize artwork like that is expensive and this is so much more personal! (I have a special inflection for when I'm saying that something is really expensive.  You should imagine that I just said expensive in that way.) Who says kids artwork only belongs on the refrigerator?