DIY Text Painting

Here is a detailed how-to for the text painting I made last week for the guest half bathroom.  I used parchment paper to transfer my text and desired font onto my canvas, which is a neat little trick!

How to Make DIY Text Art:

I taped off the first color blocked section.  I painted it a pale blue/turquoise, using a large paintbrush and acrylic paint.

Don’t mind the dim lighting in my “studio” a.k.a. messiest basement ever.

I waited three hours for the paint to dry, then taped off another section and painted it.  I waited for three hours and finally painted the final cream block of color.  For all three colors I used a dry paintbrush and brushed away from the tape to help avoid bleeding.  Then I had a color blocked painting:

While I waited for the paint to dry (as tempting as it was to watch), I worked on the letters.  I printed out the letters I wanted on my computer, using a large font, and taped them together with spacing that looked “right”.

How to Use Parchment Paper as Art Transfer Paper:

I laid parchment paper over the word and carefully traced the perimeter of the letters.  You can also purchase artist’s tracing paper, but parchment paper was convenient and I found it worked just as well.  And thanks to Costco, I have oodles of it.

Then I flipped the parchment paper over and followed the outline of the tracing I had done.  I placed paper under the parchment paper because the graphite transferred.

I flipped the parchment again and followed traced the letters with my pencil again.  The tracing I did on the back side deposited graphite on the canvas.  Neat trick, right?

Yup, that is a Dora the Explorer pencil.

I filled in the lines using a very small, angled paintbrush.  I prefer this method because it created a hand drawn look (but much neater than my hands could do unassisted) and not a stenciled look.  But this project would work with letter stencils too.

Half-way done.  More paint needed to make the letters opaque.

Here is my color inspiration: an ad I filed away just because the color combo was so inspiring.

My inspiration.

Word.