Photo Canvas Wall Art

I have been dying to make/buy a photo canvas for quite some time. My dad has a beautiful one, with a photo of a Hibiscus flower. It’s amazing. And I’ve seen great options around blog land too, but I just wasn’t sure quite what I wanted to do. The photo canvases can be pretty expensive – usually over $100 I think.

But then I found something wonderful at Office Depot. Want to see what I did with it?

Pretty fun right? It’s so hard to tell what the texture of the images are, but here’s what I found at the store.

That’s right, printable canvas paper. Seriously? Has this stuff been around for a while? If it has, don’t tell me. I am enjoying my little discovery. :)  I was so tickled when I saw it, I snatched it right up.

Once I had the paper, I knew I needed something to stretch it around. I checked in the art section of Michael’s for canvas stretcher wood (I don’t know what the actual term for this is) but there wasn’t any small enough for my paper. But in my searching, I found this:

Michael’s has these little wooden frames for $1 right now. And they are the perfect size! Woo hoo! :) Now we’re in business.

I had a ton of photos that I had taken of the kids around Christmas time that I’ve been wanting to use in some way for a long time.  Some of them are sweet, and some are pretty goofy. My kids are monkeys. Obviously.

I printed out each of the images at the draft setting, just to make sure they’d wrap around the canvas well and not lose any important part of the photo.

Then I printed each image out on the canvas paper.

Once they were all printed, I laid them out, one at a time, and put a frame in the center.

I started stapling around the sides, leaving the corners free.

Once the sides were stapled, then I worked on the corners, folding the sides down and stapling more.

I wasn’t as happy with this part of it. They didn’t lay quite as flat as I was hoping they would. If you have a technique or suggestion, I’d love to hear it.

Once the corners were all done, we had a finished canvas!

I just repeated these steps for all the canvases. I then laid them out to try different placements.

Once there were all set up the way I liked, I used my handy dandy Gorilla Glue to glue the top two canvases onto the bottom ones. This worked really well. They are stuck on tightly. I let it dry overnight so it would be good and set before I hung it up.

I put several nails up, one under each bottom frame.

I really love how it turned out! I know those large canvases are great, but they’re only one picture and I would have had a hard time choosing only one. :) This way I get a bunch. And the canvas paper looks so great. It printed up easily, never got stuck in my printer, and was dry immediately.

Here’s a picture so you can see perspective on the wall.

One more photo for you. . .

So my photo canvas adventure ended up costing me around $18. ($10 for the canvas paper and $8 for the frames). Not too shabby huh?

What do you think? Has anyone done anything similar?

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