One of the things I love about crafting is the opportunity to be creative and also creating things for my family or home. This week we're celebrating Ellen's 3rd anniversary of Ellen Hutson, LLC and to go along wtih that, I wanted to celebrate family. I hope you enjoy this fun project that will bring out your inner artist.
The base of this project is 9 4x4" canvases from Canvas Concepts. These canvases come in two packs so if you re-create this project exactly, you'll need a few packages with one canvas leftover for a mini canvas project. Feel free to change up your inspirational word. What about CREATE for your craft room for a great alternative?
The canvases used on this project come already primed so I was able to get right to work painting my canvases with Charcoal Black Studio Paint. The Studio Artist Brushes work really well for this project and I love the variety of sizes. Paint the sides of the canvases first for ease of handling and then the front. It really doesn't matter exactly how smooth you get the paint on. If you'd like a more hand-painted art look, feel free to vary the thickness of the paint. After covering the surface well, you'll want to allow the paint to dry at least a couple hours so that the mask doesn't remove it at a later step. To protect my work surface I used a Non-Stick Craft Sheet.
To create my word art I used a few different masks to easily mask off the areas I wanted to remain black. The 2 inch Newsprint Alphabet Masks were great for creating the letters. To embellish the non-letter squares, I used the Timeworks Mask and the Regal Mini Mask from Advantus.Press the sticky masks on well so that paint will not run under your mask.
The painting itself is a super fun experience. I encourage you to play around with the colors, brush it on light and heavy and just enjoy it. I used Landscape Green, Sky Blue, Yellow Pastel and Dash of Red to create my color palette. To get the more muted shades you see here, I mixed a dash of red or black in with the green and blue and painted the canvases. To get the more mottled artistic look you see below, I then lightly brushed on some surface colors to add interest to the layer. When you are satisfied with your look, allow to dry well.
I wanted to add a little more texture and interest to each canvas so I chose a few Backgrounders and Scrapblocks to stamp onto some of my canvases. I used Sophisticated Swirl Backgrounder, Spanish Script Backgrounder, Vintage Text Scrapblock and Wood Grain Backgrounder. Each was lightly inked with paint from a Black Adirondack Paint Dabber but you can also use the black paint that you painted the surface with and brush it over the stamps. Press carefully onto the surface of the canvas as desired.
Remove masks from surface of your canvases. I seem to have forgotten to remove the L mask on this photo but you get the idea. If you find that paint has bled under your mask, simply take the smallest brush and touch it up with black paint. Clean your masks and replace on carrier sheet as they can be reuses again and again for other projects.
Hang your wall art as desired and enjoy. If you use 9 squares, your finished piece will be approximately 14" square when hung.
I think the hardest part of this project was deciding which wall to hang it on.
Thanks for stopping by the CLASSroom!
