Sharing is caring!

 

affiliate disclosure

This blog post contains affiliate links. Using these links does not make the price higher for you if you should decide to purchase an item from one of the links.

I know I’m late to the party with the reverse canvas craze. I’ve attempted them in the past with varying degrees of success and failure. I wasn’t happy with the results. Maybe it was a little bit of my perfectionism peeking through. Maybe it wasn’t. I decided to put my own spin on this craft. You know I want to make it my own. With all of the individual talents that reside in my family. I decided to pool them together and create a unique but spectacular family craft/work of art. This will be an interesting ride so strap in and let me know what you think in the end.

Reverse Canvas supplies

My new craft doesn’t exactly have a name but we’ll see how it goes. The supplies needed for this reverse canvas are as follows

1. Canvas board or stretched canvas. Either one works for this. I just like the sturdy nature of the canvas board. The stretched canvas gives a little too much for my purposes. I chose a 16 x 20 inc size. Needed the extra space on this project.

2. Acrylic paints. I suppose you could use oil based paints, but the mess and clean up would cause a massive head ache.  Have you tried getting oil paint off of your hands?  It’s not an easy task.  The acrylics are easier to clean up.  So  use what you know best and feel comfortable with.  For me and my family we choose acrylics.

3. Adhesive vinyl. Color of you choice. For this I like the oracal 631. There are several great suppliers out there. You can check out the one I like here. If you use vinyl you have to have a way to cut it out. Two of the most popular machines out there for the amateur crafter are the Cricut from Provo Craft and Cameo from Silhouette. I prefer the Cricut because that is what I know. Also in all honesty I’ve never tried the cameo.

4. This next one is strictly your choice. My daughter lent her artistic skills to this project. Sketching pencils and brushes for her acrylic paints were necessary.

Preparation

Before you get started you will need to prepare your canvas.  The vinyl you choose to work with as a stencil and as permanent design has a hard time adhering to the textured finish of your canvas,  So you need to pretreat it by painting it with a white paint.  Let it dry for a few hours.

The first step is to definitely plan out what you are going to put on your canvas. One of my favorite quotes attributed to Benjamin Franklin is. “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” This applies to crafting along with your whole life. So it is great advice. Try and follow it. The reason a plan is needed on this project there are several different mediums involved. In order to be successful you not only have to plan what you are putting on your canvas but when you will apply it. Mess up your steps and you mess up your project.

Time to get Crafty

 

This is the brainchild of myself and my daughter.  We wanted to create a heart with the word Family inside.  The Reverse part of this canvas craft is painting a hand and applying the hand print to inside the heart.  On vinyl we cut out a heart shape from a square piece of vinyl.  We included the word family inside the cut out heart.  That way when we were done with our hand print we could remove the vinyl and have the canvas shine through the word family.

Getting our hands dirty

Well it didn’t go as planned.  The vinyl allowed the paint to bleed underneath the lettering.  It did not look appealing at all.  Thank goodness I have a talented daughter.  See some of here work here. She touched up the lettering and filled it in with a darker color.  So the features word family is bold and strong now.

It started with Dad and the darkest color first.  The dad hand print would be a dark color and the remaining five hand prints would be increasingly lighter as we moved down the family in ages.  The idea behind this is that all prints would be visible.

This part of the project was not easy.  My oldest daughter is on the Autism spectrum.  After she watched the rest of us painting up our hands.  She wanted nothing to do with it.  She was not going to let us get her hands dirty.  We have learned to pick our battles when dealing with situations like this.   So with some creative ideas.  We managed to get everybody’s hand included.  After the hand prints

Touch ups were needed

 

The vinyl was removed and the touch ups were completed.  Our reverse canvas was coming together nicely.  This next part is why having an artistic daughter comes in handy.  She sketched in a rose with vines on each side of the heart.  Her next step was to colorize them.  She painted them to add detail and contrast.

Which brings us close to the final steps in creating this piece.  We needed to add a heading on top of the heart and a saying on the bottom of our heart.  Just as a side not I need to remind people I live with 4 women (3 daughters, wife) and one son.  My son is only 6.   So the testosterone supply is overpowered and out shined by the estrogen levels in the house.  So the sayings on our reverse canvas were heavily influenced by the female vote.

We (they) decided that on top we would place the words The Johnston’s.  Directly underneath that we put my wife’s favorite slogan. Forever Strong.  Which brings us to the bottom of our project.  The wording Together Forever would finish it off.   There wasn’t much arguing that point as we all truly do love each other.

Here is another blogger want to get crafty who had a great idea.  Check them out.