Inspirational Canvas Art

My typical process for finding and doing new projects and crafts usually involves cool ideas staying open in tabs for a week, spending a few more weeks in a bookmarks folder, and then finally just maybe I'll get around to gathering all of the materials if I still want to do it.  My canvas art project followed this path closely and ended up taking forever to finish because I kept running into road blocks.

Not knowing what kind of challenges I would have, I knew as soon as I saw the original post on elise blaha's blog that it was a must do project.  It quickly got delayed though when I decided to wait and borrow art supplies from Allie instead of buying paint, brushes, and a canvas new.  I did end up having to wait until a cabin trip, when we would both be home. (I'm totally giving away how long I've been "working" on this, it's bad)

The next delay was completely due to laziness and forgetfulness because I needed to pick out stick on letters to use.  I wanted pretty letters that were at least an inch tall because the canvas is pretty big.  I originally thought the canvas was going to be too big, but I liked how it looked in the end.

After I got the letters, cut them out, and laid out on the canvas I thought it was going to be a quick and easy finish.  Yeah, right.  Turns out that scrapbooking stickers do not stick to canvas despite being great on paper.

The letters a and n in the lower left corner were my starting point and they curled up and did not adhere to the canvas one bit.

Discouraged, I did a bit of internet searching and found out that contact paper would probably stick to canvas.  I didn't want to cut out the letters by hand so I decided again to wait until I was home so I could mooch off of mama.  She has a sizzix machine and several alphabet sets which I hoped would suit my fancy.

Thus over Christmas vacation, while Allie tried to best my glitter ornaments, I cut letters, peeled them, and painted my canvas.

DIY tip: Tweezers were the best tool for peeling the contact paper and accurate placement on the canvas.  Not wanting to free form the letters meant I had to forgo punctuation because the sizzix sets didn't have any, so I'm choosing to ignore that minor flaw.

I know the paint looks blue here, but really it's much more purple like in the picture below.

 I let the paint dry for a few hours before peeling off the letters with the tweezers.

The "y" had some paint bleeding, but very minor!

Paint bleeding under the contact paper was a concern and it did happen a bit, but I think it adds a hand crafted look to the project.  The bleeding was minor and from a distance you can hardly see it.