Canvas commissions

I go to a Toddler group every week with my little boy and for the past year we have been meeting in a different place while our church underwent major renovation work. The Clevedon Family Church welcomed our group in and let us share their lovely space. This week was our last week there before moving back to the newly refurbished church and I was asked to make two canvases as thank you presents. One for the church and one for the lovely lady who has been helping us every week.

This first canvas was the one I made for the church. It's a little bigger than A4 size. My stamping is a bit wobbly but I'm happy with how it turned out.

I started by sticking down pieces of patterned paper onto the canvas. You can see some of the paper showing through the paint here...

I dug out some old alphabet stickers and wrote out the words "love" and "thanks" repeating across the canvas, which I gessoed so they would disappear into the paint.

I then painted and stamped to finish the design, using a variety of stamps so that the Bible verse would fit in. I also discovered when I came to stamping out the numbers - I hardly have any number stamps!

This next canvas was for the lady who helped us every week. My friend tipped me off that this was a verse she liked.

I used moulding paste mixed in my acrylic paint to give it some lovely texture. The sunburst was done with the Crafters Workshop template "Burst". The flowers are from the Insightful Meadow set by Unity Stamps and I stamped them onto an old sewing pattern before using white embossing powder and then tearing them out.

Dymo tape canvas

I have written an article in the current issue of Scrap365 about using Dymo tape on scrapbook pages and so I thought I'd share a canvas I recently made for a friend using more tape.

I was talking about church banners with my friend Kate and she came up with an idea for this Bible verse from Song of Songs to be written over a background of other verses about love. I took her idea and ran with it , using my embossed Dymo tape to write out the verses.
 

It took three evenings of clicking away with my Junior Dymo embossing label maker to complete enough tapes to cover the background (the finished canvas is a bit bigger than A4). I was able to use any colours of tape from my generous stash as I coated the whole thing with a couple of layers of gesso at the end.

I cut out a heart stencil from some scrap card and used my fingers to rub on the different paint colours. I then rubbed on some more paint around the edges of the canvas. Using my fingers to apply the paint meant that I had good control over where the paint was going and how it highlighted the embossed words.

I used matte multi medium to add pieces of tissue paper on the surface and I also used it to do an image transfer of some birds and book text. I added a few bits of microporous tape on the edge of the heart and printed with some bubble wrap too.

I wrote the verse with my large brush Pitt pen. That was the scary bit! I tired it out on some scrap paper first to check the size of my lettering and how it would fit in the heart and then I went for it. I was very relieved at the end to step back from the canvas and see no spelling mistakes!

Psalm 139 canvases

I have been thinking about making this series of canvases for a little while and I am taking part in an online class over on Big Picture Classes called "Scrapbooking your Faith" with Courtney Walsh. It's a really inspiring class and it gave me a little push to get these finished. Last weekend I spent a very enjoyable day with my friends at my local crop sticking, inking and painting and managed to finish these in one day (including some more playtime in the evening).

If you'd like to know more about the details in the canvases and why I put them there, check out this post on my other blog.