DIY Canvas Coffee Art

This has to be one of the most drawn out projects I've ever worked on! All the way back in February, {yes February!}, I posted some pictures of my kitchen wall as well as a bunch of Photoshopped art ideas and asked you guys to help me decide what to do by voting on your favorite concept & layout.

The consensus seemed to be that I should move the junk off both walls and do several pieces following the coffee theme.

About a week later, I kicked off March with a trip to Hobby Lobby to get my creative juices flowing and to get some supplies to start my project! Originally I was trying to find some frames the right size for my wall, but frames are just SO expensive. Instead I discovered Hobby Lobby had packs of 2 16"x20" canvasses for only $7.99 and decided that I wanted to figure out a way to make them work.

I knew I wanted to give the canvases some sort of background texture, so I decided to cover them in book pages from Uncle Tom's Cabin. It took a few days to get them all covered, but it was definitely worth it! 

After I had the canvases covered, I sketched out what I wanted my different coffees to look like on graph paper {scaled 16 squares by 20 squares, so each square represented an inch on the canvas}

I also played around with paint trying to decide if I wanted to do coloured cups or not... so glad I did!

Next I typed out my titles in word, using the grid to make sure the letters were the correct size. At first I wanted to use the letters as stencils, but I realized I might as well just use the letters themselves if I was going to do all the work of cutting them out!

I used a flexible measuring tape to lay out my letters on the canvas and glued them on with regular 'ol Elmer's glue

Using the same measuring tape, plus an additional ruler, I referenced the grids I had drawn my coffee cups on and drew out the big versions with pencil. Once those were finished I "coloured them in" with paint. These steps probably took up the biggest chunk of time, mainly because I was nervous to attempt the large scale drawings, then nervous to paint them! Moral of the story: just do it!

After I had all the cups painted, I thought they still looked a little plain, so I added more texture with stencils, hand drawn swirls, and by lightly glazing over the pages with a couple colours of the coffee coloured paints. {In order to make "glaze" you just add water to your paint, depending on how transparent you want it to be.}

And then finally I got to hang them in our kitchen! Woohoo! They've actually been up for at least a week now - maybe even two. But between being sick and desperately needing to do some cleaning, it took a while for me to get around to taking pictures of them :)

And here's where the little cart ended up that had been on the wall before. {Recognize that strawberries sign??}

So wonderful to finally have these done and up! Here are some close ups: