So just like the picture above says, the big deal about this is using Fabric Paint to make your design for your canvas,—no Silhouettes, or Stencils or the ‘using sicker letters and peeling them off’,—Here’s a brief explanation of what I did:
I created this canvas as a gift for my mom. My son calls her “Mamaie” (Ma-mai-eh) which is Grandma in Romanian and their favorite song to sing together is “You Are My Sunshine” and so this little canvas was born.
I prepped my canvas and painted it with Acrylic paint. I was going for it to look like the sun was rising and chasing away the darkness; my mom thought that it looks like the deep ocean and then coming into the shore and the sandy beach. Either way I just painted it by plopping a ‘blop’ of acrylic paint in the section I wanted it, one each of blue, turquoise, and yellow, and then blended them across the canvas horizontally and then down into each other.
I put the canvas aside to let it dry. In Photoshop I created a little subway art with the words of “You Are My Sunshine” that I wanted on the canvas. I printed it out on plain paper.
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Then I grabbed my dimensional Fabric Paint
and a piece of wax paper. I lay my subway art down on the table and laid my wax paper over top and taped it down a bit so it wouldn’t move on me. Then I got to work tracing the words in Fabric Paint onto the wax paper. (When doing this you want to make sure that you’re not going too thin with the fabric paint so it’s easy to peel off the wax paper when it dries. If the paint is too thin then your letters/art may rip or stretch out.)
I also printed out a little abstract doily that I traced too. I let them dry for a couple hours. Once dry, I began to peel the letters off and arrange onto my Canvas the way I wanted. When I was completely happy with it (I had to make sure cause after the next step there was no going back) I grabbed my Mod Podge (I LOVE this stuff) and went over the letters and doily to glue it all down. You may need to hold onto the letters with your finger or the end of a paintbrush so wen you brush the Mod Podge over top you don’t pick up any letters—they’re a pain to straighten down again. After the letters and my doily were dry I covered my entire canvas with Mod Podge to seal it.
Voilà! My beautiful canvas!
Now depending on your canvas and what type of finished sides it has you may be satisfied and move on to another project. Well I wasn’t satisfied. So…
…I grabbed some pretty cardstock and cut strips to match the width of the sides of my canvas and Mod Podg-ed it on; then sealed the sides with another coat on top. Gave my canvas a pretty ribbon effect all around…also hid a couple ugly staples (I hate it when they staple canvases on the side!)
There now you have your own beautiful piece of art and I’m sure many more will be on the way…at least for me they will be!
