Making a Birthday Canvas

Our family was celebrating my nieces 50th birthday on New Year’s day.  I wanted to do something special for her so I decided to make a mixed media Birthday canvas.  I had a general idea of what I wanted to do and was able to find the needed supplies at my local crafts store.  I started with a 5x7x2 wooden canvas (you could use a regular canvas), I wanted to put her age on the canvas, her initial, a crown, and possibly feet on the project so she could sit it on a table.

I decided I wanted to have music in the background and found a free downloadable of  “Happy Birthday”.  I torn around the edges of the sheet of music and then used matte medium to glue it to the canvas.  I also painted over the top with matte medium.   I then put a few drops of Buttermilk paint on the canvas and moved the paint around with a credit card.  If you need more instructions on this technique go over to this blog post.

Celebrating always means cake to me, so I decided to put a cake on the canvas. I also painted her initial, age, and the crown.  By this time I realized I wanted Happy Birthday to be a little lower so I printed it out again, tore around the words and used matte medium to glue to the canvas.  I painted the icing Poodleskirt Pink, and the cake plate Baby Blue.  I shaded the cake sections with Honey Brown and used Grape Juice and Emperor’s Gold on the extras.  These are all DecoArt paint colors.

I wanted to add some details to my design using sequin waste and a stencil.  Both of these are available from Amazon.  You could use any stencil(s).

Using the sequin waste and Honey Brown I added more details to the cake.  I printed the word “Celebrate” and cut out each letter and attached it to the front.  I also added different element from the stencil to the front, top and sides.  I also outlined the cake with my Faber-Castell PITT white marker (I love this marker).  I highlighted and shaded the icing and cake plate.  I also added her name and birth date on the sides.

The “icing on the cake” so to speak was the glitter and glitz.  I added the glitter to each of the elements, and rhinestones to the crown,  and then glued them in place on the canvas.  I placed matte medium on the top layer of icing and sprinkled with seed beads and then added glitter to the icing.  I choose a small candle stick for the base.

This project worked up quickly and is a fun reminder for my niece of her special day.

Here is a PDF file with the pattern, background and word “celebrate” if you would like to make this project.

Hope this post will give you some ideas for celebrating a special person in your life’s birthday.

Happy Celebrating,

Jane