Easy, Cheap Canvas Pictures for the Living Room!

So my mother bought this adorable silhouette painting of a labrador retriever at Home Goods a few months ago and I was thinking about buying one of a kitty for our house, but I wanted one that matched the living room, so after a few months of looking I gave up and decided to try to make one myself.  I found a bunch of cool tutorials online (such as these adorable circus animals) and decided to give it a shot.  Here is the end result:

I think its pretty cute!  If anyone else wants to give this a try, here's how I did it.

Materials:

• 16" by 20" canvas;
• Reeves Acrylic Paint in raw umber, phthalo blue, and colbalt blue;
• Foam Brushes;
• Scotch Blue painter's tape;
• Krylon Easy Tack (though, something a little less sticky might be better, honestly);
• Ruler;
• A "palette" (a.k.a. a paper plate).

First, I took pictures of Samantha, my husband's kitty, to use as the templates.  This picture is my personal favorite, because it shows her complete and utter disdain for my project:
 

Second, I painted the canvas a solid brown.

Next time, I think I will try a burlap canvas, so it does not have to be painted.  Acrylic paint takes a long time to cure, so I did this first step the week before I wanted to actually "paint" my silhouettes.

I wanted to use a few different images of Sam for this project so I decided to create a window pane style with the Scotch Blue tape.

 
I then chose my favorite pictures of Sam and one random internet image of a fish and a bowl for the top left square.  I printed each picture and Easy-Tacked it to a piece of card stock.

Next, I cut the images out, staying as close to the edges as possible, and Easy-Tacked them into their panes.

Then I painted!  Remember to paint outwards from the picture to the uncovered area.  If you paint the other way it drastically increases the likelihood a bleed-through.

Once it was all covered, I let it sit for a few hours so the paint could dry before I tried to remove the templates.

Once I peeled the templates off, I had to do a bit of touch up for the places where the paint bled through, but if I had been more careful to only paint along the paper, instead of against it, I have a feeling there would have been a whole lot less touching up!

Thanks for stopping by!  Leave a comment below and let me know how you like my new project!