Photo to Canvas Art

Oh what fun it can be to make canvas art! 

Here is my older son and Bob Dylan playing guitars. Not at the same place; nor together.

My son is actually sitting at the campfire playing for family and Bob Dylan is on stage with thousands of fans watching his performance.

So what is with this artwork? I thought it would be cool to make an art piece of the two of them for my son's music room.

Dylan is one of his favorite inspirations. I must say, he performs and sounds just like Dylan too. Even playing the harmonica and guitar while singing. (Yup, I'm bragging. I'm a proud mom.) We really enjoy listening to him.

This is how I did the the art piece:

I chose two photos with similar lighting and easy to merge poses.

One of "E". 

And one of "B". 

(Photo chosen for one time personal use, not for sale)

I went to FotoFlexer to reverse and erase most of the background of the camping photo, then coloring in dark areas,

to get this and save it. It needed to be rough because I wanted an art piece, not a photograph.

I left the camper lights in the photo to blend into the artwork. 

Then, I went into PicMonkey and put the two photos side by side in a non spaced collage and saved it:

PicMonkey also allows you to create art overlays. After finding the look I wanted I ended up with this: 

The two photos became blended together. I saved a few sizes of it in a folder. The size needed is just short of 1 megabyte to upload for a poster. I did the resize in a 600 x 500 pixels.

To make a poster size of the image to decoupage, I went to Block Posters to create a 2'x1.5' poster out of 4 plain paper sheets printed off my inkjet to fit my canvas. The site guides you with previews to get the poster you want. You can try several times before you save a PDF of your poster size photo.

Once the PDF is created and saved, you print out your poster and trim the photo sections to be transferred or glued and decoupaged.


Oh, and make sure you have full ink cartridges, not nearly empty ones like my first attempt here. :)

Still a cool art piece. I practiced cutting and lining up edges with this failure.

Full ink cartridges work better than empty ones  :)

During my first attempt I reversed the photo to transfer the image on canvas with Mod Podge. It failed. It didn't transfer. Why? Mine was not a transfer medium. If you use a transfer medium, it will work. I need to get some!

So I printed out the non reversed version of the photo and glued the image directly onto the canvas over the mistake I made. After the glue dried, I decoupaged over the entire canvas.

I started painting on Mod Podge at the seams where the pages met on the images and used criss cross brush stokes similar to painting.

I covered the entire canvas surface with the decoupage solution. The bubbles concerned me, but I waited it out, not disturbing the image. (It was ugly) After the Mod Podge dried thoroughly, the bubbles had mostly flattened out by itself.


 I sanded the surface to get the distressed effect I wanted.

I rough sanded the edges of the image where it met the sides of the canvas for more of the effect.

I hung it temporarily in my youngest son's music room to take pictures. It's a lot smaller than my older son's room at his house. So the photos are not very good with a full set of drums in my way... the space is really limited.

I think it's going to be a nice addition to his Dylan collection. 

 (I think I'm going to play around with more pictures in PicMonkey. It's just too much fun!)