Modern Black and White Art Canvas

SUPPLIES & TOOLS:

• ART:
• 3'x 3' Pre-Stretched Canvas
• Black and White Acrylic Paint
• Paintbrushes
• FRAME:
• 1"x 2"x 8" Poplar Board, 2
• 1/2"x 2"x 4' Poplar Board, 4
• Clamps
• Miter Saw or Miter Box
• Wood Glue
• Sandpaper
• Band Clamp
• Wood Filler
• Hammer
• 1" Finishing Nails
• Optional: Paper Towels

DIRECTIONS:

1. Begin with a medium-sized paintbrush and make wavy, intuitive lines all across the surface of the canvas. Continually turn the canvas around as you work. With a larger brush, begin to fill in some of the shapes you find on the canvas with black paint. Fill it in so that there are more black areas than white areas. Then take your white paint and begin to extend the remaining white areas over some of the black areas and continue until the canvas is more white areas than black areas. Then, extend the black areas into the white areas until the white and black feels balanced. Go back over the white areas and black areas until the lines are clean and the interior of the shapes are fully white or fully black. Leave the gray areas that were created by the first coat of white over black as they are.
2. Paint the sides of the canvas black.

1. Cut your two pieces of 1"x 2"x 8' boards in half so that you have four 1"x 2"x 4' boards. Glue the 1/2"x 2"x 4' boards to the 1"x 2"x 4's to turn each board into an L- shaped piece. Clamp each L-piece and let it dry for the time recommended.
2. Once dry, use a miter saw or miter box to cut one end of each piece of wood at a 45 degree angle. Place the wood so that the 1/2" board is on the bottom, and make sure that each angle is cut so that the 1/2" board is more narrow than the 1" board. Otherwise the wood lip that the canvas is supposed to sit on will be on the outside of the frame.
3. Place two boards together at their mitered corners and place art on top of the wood lip. Space it out from the outer frame about 1/4". Mark the place where your art ends on the lips of each board, measure out 1/4" from that spot and mark the inner edge of the outer frame. That will be your approximate cut point, though, you may want to make the first cut 1/4" up from that point just to make certain that the frame won't be too small. Fine tune it once all the pieces are cut and you can see exactly how much you need to take it in.
4. Repeat for the other two boards.
5. Place all wood pieces and the art together to check your frame lengths, trim lengths if need be. When the frame is the right size, lightly sand each corner and apply wood glue lightly to each corner. It's helpful to have a paper towel ready to wipe off glue overflow. Clamp the whole thing with a band clamp - wrap the straps around the whole frame and tighten. You may need to place a small piece of cardboard between the clamp's tightening mechanism and the wood of your frame to keep the clamp from pressing a mark into your frame. Allow to dry.
6. Strengthen the corner joints by hammering in two nails at each corner. This is more easily done by clamping the frame to the table to keep it in place as you hammer.
7. Fill any gaps in the corner joins with wood glue. Allow to dry, then sand.
8. Paint the frame black, allow to dry.
9. Center the artwork on top of the lip so that there is 1/4" between the art and the frame all the way around. Lift up each corner and apply a very little bit of glue, allow to dry. This glue application is just to ensure that the artwork stays in place as you flip it over and nail through the back of the frame. When the glue is dry, cover the table with paper or ensure that the table is very clean and flip the framed artwork over and hammer nails in about 1/8" from the edge of the lip.

JOANN HACKS:

• Draw your mitered corner direction on your piece of wood when you mark the cut point to save yourself from accidentally cutting the angle going in the wrong direction.