Scrapbooking on Canvas

I have always wanted to try to do a scrapbook page on canvas so that I could mount it on the wall in a frame or shadow box. I have also been trying to move of out my 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbook page size for my personal albums. I have helped several friends with their 12x12 layouts, but have been hesitant to do my own. I am trying to change that though! I have already completed 6 (almost 8) layouts in the 12x12 size. Stay tuned for a link to my friend Lindelon's blog and a challenge that I did based on one of her sketches.

Sorry for the rabbit trail...back to the subject at hand: canvases.

I shared in my last post that I had been super busy and emotionally drained from a funeral last week. My cousin Rusty, at the age of 23, was tragically murdered. It was the most heart wrenching thing I think I have ever experienced through the eyes of someone else (my Aunt Rita), if that makes sense. I am the only one in the family who does anything with pictures, so naturally I volunteered to help in the way that I knew I could - by making the photo displays at the funeral. Even though my Aunt Rita is not a scrapbooker, she has boxes upon boxes of photos. You'd never know she wasn't a diehard scrapbooker after seeing all of those pictures!

I picked up some photos, scanned and cropped each one with my PSP software, loaded them onto a flash drive and went to Target's Kodak Machine for instant prints. As I was organizing all of the pictures, I immediatley had a vision about what I wanted to do with them. I had too many to make a scrapbook, or even create 12x12 layouts so I decided to try my canvas idea out. I used several sizes, ranging from 11x14 to 16x20. I painted the entire canvas with acrylic paint and then went to work designing the layouts mainly with my cricut. I used my stash of embellishments and paper to coordinate everything. I used Rusty's favorite color, yellow as the main color and accented with blues, browns and greens.

I picked up photos on Sunday at around noon and had to have them completely finished by 4:00 on Monday afternoom! Talk about pressure! How do you chronicle a person's entire life in roughly 29 hours and still manage to sleep, feed and care for three small kids and your husband? My husband was the first to step up to the plate and take care of the kids all day Sunday, and help me paint all of the canvases until 2:00 in the morning! Monday morning, the best sister in the whole wide world - Brandy - came to my rescue when she picked up my kids og and kept them until my husband got off work. Finally you have my dear friend, Lindelon, who should win an award for just being my friend and listening to me ramble on and on about anything and everything everyday. I knew I could not complete such a task in my own strength, and if it weren't for God's divine intervention and the help of his willing people, I might not have ever been able to finish this! Lindelon spent the entire day on Monday helping me add embellishments, mat all the photos and arrange them onto the canvases so beautifully.

There are so many photos and techniques that I used that it would be very difficult to explain here. If you have any specific questions, leave a comment and I will answer you as soon as I can.