Clicking around on Pinterest last week, I found this image. I clicked on the link to the original source, expecting to find a tutorial on how to create the canvases. Instead I found a shop in the UK selling them for, frankly, an outrageous amount of money (and only available in the UK to boot).

Undeterred, I decided to figure it out on my own. The original was made with wooden letters on canvas, and my first instinct was to try to recreate it exactly. But after a trip to Michaels to find that small wooden letters cost $.99 for a bag of three of the same letter, I thought I would try to figure out a different method that would give me a similar result.

First, I tried creating the raised lettering with a hot glue gun, but it dried too quickly and I didn’t have good enough control over it to make the letters smooth. My second attempt was using plain old Elmer’s glue. I was able to get it nice and smooth, but when it dried, the letters weren’t raised enough. Third, I tried using 3-D fabric paint (or as we called it back in the day, puffy paint). I guess third time was the charm, because it worked perfectly! Here’s how I did it:

For this project, you will need:

Stretched canvas (I bought two small ones, but you can use whatever size you’d like)
Ruler and pencil
Something pointy to fix any mistakes (I used a wooden skewer, but a toothpick would work just as well)
Acrylic paint (whatever color you’d like) and a paint brush
3-D fabric paint in white

Step 1: Using your pencil and ruler, draw a line or lines on which to write your quote.

Step 2: Write your quote. I chose one of my favorites by Joseph Conrad. I found it was easiest to do it in script, but if you’d prefer some other font, go for it!

Step 3: Go over your quote with the paint. Squeeze the bottle firmly and evenly, and if it sputters, just keep going. Once you’re done, take your skewer or tooth pick and go back to even out your mistakes.

This is what it will look like at this point.

Let the paint dry for the amount of time specified on the bottle. Mine said 4 hours.

Step 4: Paint over the entire canvas with your acrylic paint. I went with white, but you can do whatever color you’d like. Keep in mind that another color WILL take at least 2 coats to get solid, and most likely more.

Step 5: The paint will want to pool around your letters. To get rid of this, go over them several times in a cross-hatch pattern (brush vertically up, then vertically down, then back and forth horizontally. Once you’re happy with how it looks, brush over the entire thing from left to right one more time, just to get all of the brush marks going the same way.

Wait for it to dry, and display! I’m planning on doing at least one more of these and hanging them over the built-in bookshelves in my living room, along with the Hatch Show Print pieces I just bought (but haven’t gotten framed yet).

And as I look at the last few pics, I realize I didn’t dot most of the I’s! Oops! Going to have to fix that!