paper | Rad Design

A friend of mine is pregnant with her first baby, a lil girl named Finley Gray (how cute is that?!) Anyway, i wanted to make something for their nursery and just started creating. I knew the nursery had grey walls so i decided to have the canvas stay mostly white so it would pop. They also arent the typical pink and purple type of parents (yay!) so i decided to pick out some paper with different fun colors, feminine patterns and write out “Finley Gray” in the paper. Of course i decided to use the Silhouette to cut them out or else it would have looked like a 5 year old made it. Not exactly the look i was going for. And i went with Amy Butler paper (got it at michael’s like 50 years ago) because i just adore her patterns.

So i started out by making the page setting as large as the canvas – 20X16 so that i could see what the final product would look like. Once i found the font i liked, i made it the size id like – just slightly going off the edges of the canvas.

Once i had the letters the size i wanted, i made a separate page set at 12X12 and put random letters and a flower on it. I used maybe 4 or 5 different types of paper so that the letters would be different colors and patterns. I cut out more letters than i needed just so i could play with it a little bit and see which colors i really loved.

Then i got to cutting:

Once they were all cut out and ready to go I placed them on the canvas and moved them around until they were exactly where i had in mind. I thought again about painting the canvas before i started to put the letters on it but I just liked the simplicity and it would be over complicated if i added more colors.

Initially started glueing them down with an extra strength glue stick. I knew i would be painting over the whole thing with a clear glaze so i didn’t think it would matter. It did. Didn’t work out too well. So i just went straight to a mod podge type of adhesive to stick them down. That work well so i went through and stuck them all down like that. When coating the whole thing, i had never tried paper on canvas and i wasn’t too sure what would work. So i started off with mod podge. BAD idea! It made the letter start warping and wrinkling badly. (can you tell which letter i messed up?!) I didnt a little online research and found out that acrylic medium works the best. It worked WONDERS. There was no warping, and it painted on beautifully. It will also seal the paper enough to avoid damage. So i highly suggest using medium!

One of my favorite parts was the flower. Just a lil smidge of girlie-ness for the new lil one. The bottom two layers of the flower i stuck down to the canvas and did a few layers of medium. The center piece i glued down in the center but let the petals stick up! I coated those petals on all sides with medium to keep it sturdy.