Last summer, a local business owner contacted me wondering if I could make her a banner that could spruce up her booth for shows and events. The Whole Kit N Kaboodle creates and sells scrapbooking kits from a cute little shop located in Noblesville, Indiana. The shop owner and scrapbooking kit designer, Andrea Meyer, needed a huge banner—about 4' x 8'—displaying the shop name, as well as flowers and some butterflies to fill it up. I was so excited to paint something this large and I knew I could do something really fun and special (and also durable and useable) for her. I started by making three different sketches for her to choose from.
I spent a lot of time planning how to make something that was cost effective and doable, and arrived at the decision to use a thick, unprimed canvas as a surface. The gesso that most companies use to pre-prime loose canvas on a roll can be brittle and has the tendency to crease if it's not stretched on a frame. Since this banner would be moved around quite a bit, it needed to be able to withstand some abuse without showing too much wear. I bought the unprimed canvas (122 Yankee by Fredrix) and cut it to size, leaving about 2 inches around the border* (to prevent fraying edges, I folded that extra two inches back and ironed them down). I added metal grommets (I bought the grommets and grommet tool at Michaels craft store, you can probably find them just about any here though) around the edge for easy hanging. Then I used clear gesso to prime the whole canvas. Clear gesso leaves the raw canvas color visible while creating a barrier between the paint and canvas itself, which helps the colors look vibrant and smooth.
*A NOTE for anyone looking to do this: As gesso dries, it makes the canvas shrink a bit. This is really helpful when you're stretching a canvas. It's not helpful at all when it's loose like this. Make sure you apply the gesso in even, thin layers, slowly building up the gesso over the whole surface. I used a 2" sponge brush to do this part. Because I had the edges folded under to keep them from fraying, they didn't get primed at the same time as the front and ended up getting wavy. If I were to redo this, I would apply the clear gesso first all the way to the edge, THEN fold the edges in.
Prepping the canvas and getting it ready for paint took a lot longer and was a lot more work than I had expected. I think by the time I got it hanging on my wall to start drawing the design, I had already spent at least 3 hours on it. But it was WORTH IT. The color and feel of the raw canvas makes it look handmade and unique without looking unprofessional. Then I just sketched out the design and painted away! (The FUN part.)
Using textured and patterned decorative papers for accents in the flowers and for the wings of the butterflies gave it a great collaged look, and I wanted the banner to feel "scrapbook-y" more true to her business. To get the paper to adhere, I applied acrylic medium to the canvas where I wanted the paper to go, stuck the paper on to it and painted a layer of the acrylic medium over it to seal it on. Acrylic medium is flexible, dries completely clear, and is excellent for collage work like this. Just make sure you test whatever you're using it on first, because some dyes used in papers will bleed and run.
And here's the finished product! From sketches to delivery, this took me two weeks to finish. It was a really enjoyable project for me and I learned a lot while working on it. I pray to the Gods of Freelance that I get to work on something like it again.
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