everyday is beautiful: [ my penguin DIY ]

I'VE ALWAYS been fond of Penguin Books and I've been seeing some great examples of covers used as art ~ like these orange prints by Alanna Cavanagh or the creative interpretations by Harland Miller...

I've had a canvas kicking around for a couple of years just waiting to be painted so I decided to make my own Penguin art!

I started by Googling the Penguin Classics catalogue to choose a title and I couldn't have found a more perfect one for our seaside-style home: The Beach by Alex Garland. I found a pic of some old Penguin covers and decided to choose a colour from there ~ a pretty turquoise green...

Here's what I did.

Let me start by saying that I decided to use my Silhouette Cameo to cut out the letters out of vinyl to use as a stencil. This is the first time I've done this and a word of warning... the vinyl does not stick to painted canvas. I wish I had known this before I had already cut everything out. You'd be better off using the carbon paper tracing method like I did for my other canvas painting DIY here since all of the letters will need touching up with a fine brush anyway.

I marked off the areas with masking tape and painted the coloured bands on the canvas. Once dry, I used a rag dipped into watery grey paint to get a muddier tone since my paint was too bright. While this dried, I planned my layout and cut everything out of vinyl with my Silhouette...

Next I printed out the penguin and logo on paper and used carbon paper to roughly trace the shapes I would paint cream. Once dry, I applied {or tried to apply} my vinyl. The transfer paper was much stickier than the vinyl so I had a hard time removing it. Eventually I got it off and even though the vinyl wasn't sticking to the canvas, I pounced my paint on anyway with a stencil brush and hoped for the best. I removed the vinyl and smoothed around all of the text with a fine brush and black paint...

Once I had all the text painted on {don't drink too much coffee while you do this!}, I used some cream paint to make the edges slightly irregular and rubbed on some watery brown paint around the edges to dirty it up slightly {I didn't want it to look too rough}...

Done!

Despite the difficulties I had with the vinyl stencil plan, I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I think it provides a lovely splash of colour to our living room...