Sharpie on Canvas Stained Glass Window

Did you know that dollar stores carry stretched and primed canvases? I’ve never used a canvas from an actual art supply store, but the dollar store ones seem just as good to me. And they’re a fraction of the price!

Today I’m going to share a nice little piece of wall art I made not too long ago while I was going through my replace-all-my-cheep-store-bought-wall-art-with-DIY-wall-art phase. I call it my stained glass window.

The nice thing about stretch canvas is that even though I’m not a skilled artistic painter, I can still make wall art using other media. In this case that medium was Sharpies!

First I got out my 18x12 canvas, a pencil, and a straight edge. I did not measure anything when making my design, opting instead to “free-hand” it.

I drew my first 8 lines in order to divide the canvas into manageable segments. For every line, you actually need to draw two lines running parallel with a little space in between. That little space will later be coloured black. (Sorry there are no pictures of the intermediate steps. I completed this piece before deciding to start a blog, so I didn’t think to stop and take photos.) Here the main 8 lines are highlighted in red.

Slowly but surely I began filling in each segment with increasingly smaller blocks until everything looked positively puzzling to my eye. One segment is highlighted in grey here.

I counted the blocks and divided that number by how many Sharpie colours I was using in order to know how many blocks to fill in with each colour (there were 137 blocks, I used 8 colours, 137/8≈17, therefore I used each colour to fill in about 17 or 18 blocks). You can't really tell from these photos, but I used two shades of blue and two shades of green.

The black block lines were the last thing I filled in, covering up the spots where I accidentally coloured outside of the lines. I also coloured the sides of the canvas black to complete the look.

I think it looks pretty sharp, and you need to take a close look to tell that it is not paint. My dad was amazed that I had painted all of that, and I almost didn’t tell him it was actually done with Sharpie, but I can’t lie to that guy.

What do you think? Have you done anything similar? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below!