I have been hoarding 2 canvas boards for a few years now. My oldest got them as gift from a friend, but he is into drawing, not painting. They started to get pretty dirty, so I had to do something with them. I am no artist, so painting a landscape or still life was out of the question. First I had to do something about the dirty smudges on them. I painted them white with acrylic paint, but the dirt still showed. Even after several coats of paint. Still not sure what direction I wanted to go, just aiming for getting rid of the spots, I painted one canvas red. That got rid of the dirt, so I was going to paint the other canvas red too, when my husband suggested a different color, like green. That's all I needed. An idea started to take shape, I wanted something Hungarian (again), we could put in our room. Folk art, but with a modern feel. At first I was going to use contact paper as a stencil and designed a motif with a lot of flowers. I spent 2 days cutting out the stencil and it was useless. As soon as I removed the backing, the little intricate lines got torn off or stuck together, even before I could put it on the canvas and paint inside the lines. OK, stencil idea had to go. Unless the design was simpler, and large. Then I thought, why am I going to fuss with making a stencil, and paint? Why not just use the contact paper itself as the design? I was tempted for a moment to go back to the original, detailed motif, but my finger was still sore from working on the first, so large flower it is. I chose white contact paper to make the motif out of. You can find it at Walmart.
I made the design, scanned it on the computer, and printed it off on the contact paper itself. (On the paper side.) To help my printer with the slippery contact paper side, I taped a sheet of paper there, and it went through really easy.
The blue paper is covering up the vinyl side.
The design printed beautifully on the paper side.
After I cut out the design and removed the paper backing, I just stuck it on the canvas. Nice and crisp lines.
Next I had to figure out what to do with the green canvas. I remembered an old Eastern European house blessing. It used to grace homes in forms of tapestry or it was painted right on the wall. I remember seeing it in a lot of homes in Hungary, usually a framed cross stitch or embroidery. I typed it up, made sure I checked 'mirror image' before I printed...
and I started cutting. With scissors. (Take that Silhouette machine!) The letters were large enough that it was not a problem, Just took a while.
I only measured out how far the lines needed to be from each other, and just the ruler to help with placing the letters.
It went fairly fast.
Here is what it says:
Where faith is,
Love is,
Where love is,
Peace is,
Where peace is,
Blessing is,
Where blessing is,
God is,
Where God is,
There is no Need.
I uploaded the flower to Google Documents. You are welcome to download it.
Folk Art 1
Folk Art 2
A cheap alternative to an expensive machine. You can use contact paper on many different surfaces! Wood (your cupboards) or even the wall! Have fun with it and tell us what you did in the comments so we can visit your blog too!
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