Dinosaur Baby Nursery – Painted Dinosaur Canvas

I started with a pack of 7 canvasses that I bought at Michael’s. Super inexpensive, I painted up 5 of them and I still have 2 left over! Going to my stash of Martha Stewart paints, I covered each completely in a background color that went with the fabric. Luckily, this fabric has a lot of awesome color going on, so I had plenty of paints that matched up. I ended up choosing the 3 lightest colors as background colors.

Then, here is my cheat, I traced the dinosaurs from the free dinosaur quilt pattern designed for the Babysaurus fabric line. Yup, I didn’t free-hand these dinos, just traced and transferred over. I didn’t even have to re-size the images! Had I not had the applique patterns handy, I could have taken the fabric to a copy machine and enlarged the designs, but this was even easier. And I like easy!

Then it was a matter of filling in the areas. I didn’t worry about the dinosaurs being the same color combinations as the focus fabric, I just had fun with it.

I kept filling in shapes until they were all painted. Kind-of like paint-by-number, but without the pesky numbers. You can see here that I have a faint pencil line 2″ from the edge of the frame. I added that line around each frame so that I could frame the paintings with the fabric.

 Using 3″ strips of the fabric, I added a generous coat of ModPodge to the back of the fabric strip, and put it on the canvas, lined up with my pencil line. Then I wrapped the fabric around the edges, and coated with more ModPodge.

For the fabric with the stripes, I tried to line up the stripes in the corners by mitering them. In some cases it worked, in others not so much…

All that was left was to take a fine point permanent marker and trace around my dinosaurs to give them definition. I could have used black paint and a fine paintbrush, but a marker is so much easier, and gives me more control for an even line. I then added mouths and eyes with the same marker, and was all done!