re-purposed canvas

I found this fantastically strange canvas painting of chairs at Goodwill for 4 bucks! Yee-haw.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this!

Follow these steps, and re-purpose your very own.

It was fun and easy and I just love the way it turned out!

Step 1. Find an old canvas painting that you don’t care about.

Step 2. Pick your favorite saying.

Step 3. Print out your saying in large letters in a font you like

(or a few different fonts if you want to mix it up.)

Step 4. Print it out again because your 3 year old found it and decided it was a coloring book.

Nice work.

Step 5. Get out your Silhouette and some sticky vinyl and cut out your letters.

Curse that there is yet another project that you wish you had a cutting machine for and feel sorry for yourself. (maybe that’s what I did)

And then get over it and lay out a sheet of wax paper and put strips of painters tape on it.

Sticky contact paper would work well too, but I didn’t have any.

Step 6. Lay your printed letters on top of your real or homemade contact paper and carefully cut them out with scissors, old school style.

Step 7. Peel the wax paper from the tape. This took some patience and time, but it all came off. (Contact paper would probably be less time consuming here.)

Step 8. Place your tape letters onto the canvas and press well. Especially the edges.

Step 9. Mix up some acrylic paint and paint all over the whole canvas. You can make it solid, or streaky. I left mine a little streaky. Dab carefully around the letters to prevent too much bleeding.

Step 10. Peel off the tape while the paint is still a wee bit wet.

Step 11. Clean up the parts where the paint might have bled under the tape.

Mine did bleed under the edges of the tape a little. I think it’s because my canvas was pretty shiny so the tape didn’t stick super well. If it was a matte canvas, the letters would stick better.

But, also, since mine was shiny, it was really easy to use a wet Q-tip to clean up the edges of each letter.

So, no problem.