Make Your Own Herringbone Canvas Art

Want a way to spice up your living area with a touch of classiness? Spend your day off tomorrow making your own canvas art and your walls will never be boring again. (Pro tip: sip on a glass of chardonnay to help bring out your inner creativity!)

Plaza Artist Materials and Picture Framing (just off campus at 1990 K Street) is currently having a winter sale, so head on over to get the following supplies:
– Canvas ($9.50 for this 10×10 stretched)
– Masking or painters tape
– Oil or acrylic paints (two or three colors should be fine, and if you’re into glitter, perhaps a glitter glaze to go over it)
– Paint brush

There’s a million different designs you can do with tape, but the herringbone below is a great one to try out (and it’s classier than the typical chevron that everyone and their mother has).

Take the tape and lay out horizontal lines on the canvas. To make an even chevron, do an odd number of strips:

 

With more tape, add in a chevron pattern in between each set of horizontal lines. This will leave triangles of canvas, as shown below:

 

Then, with your paints, fill in the canvas. Make sure your tape is pressed down to the canvas very tightly so that no paint gets under it and ruins your clean lines.

 

After you’ve gotten all your colors in and the paint has dried, you can throw on a glitter glaze. Depending on whether you want the glitter to fill in the blank canvas under the tape, you will either remove the tape now or after you apply the glaze. When taking off the tape, make sure to remove it at a 90 degree angle so that it comes off all in one piece.

When you’re done, you should have a piece of art that looks something like this:

Here is a real-world example, too:

Photo courtesy of kristispaintbrush.com

Happy painting! Until next time,

The DIY-er