My DIY – Fun Instagram Type Photo Canvases Of Tasty Food – With Instructions

I’m not really much of a DIYer. In adulthood, I’ve generally found paying experts to make bread, sew things, and build things ends up being cheaper and giving a better result.

But I recently took a trip to Italy and was looking for a way to use the amazing photographs I took. Putting up framed pictures of the kids at the Colosseum can only go so far, plus they look less than enthused in all the pictures I took. They loved the trip but thought it was fun to ruin my pictures. So the same child that was enthusiastically dodging through a medieval castle one minute before started looking like he wanted to skin the local cats the instant the camera came out.

That’s what you get for raising smart, um, bottoms. I can only blame myself. Probably just deserts for the time I told them Chuck E. Cheese was a made up place, like fairyland, Hogwarts, and the Hollywood Ethics Committee.

After extensive googling, I found this tutorial and was inspired to make my project. I loved her black and white project, as well as her apparent obsession with shoes, but I wanted something different. Plus, I had all these snapshots we’d taken of delicious meals we enjoyed and I thought they could be very cool as Instagram-y canvasses for the kitchen. I love how they turned out:

Those are memories right there. Tasty, tasty memories. Sipping a spritz on the shores of Lake Garda (bottom row), the cake we had outside Verona (bottom left), the time my son ordered pepperoni pizza and got pizza with peppers (bottom right).

Here’s how I did it:

My supplies. Extra important is the Aperol spritz.

I cropped, edited, and put a border around in a program called Fotor. Printed them out to match the canvas size (in my case, 5×5 inches). Unlike in the tutorial, I didn’t have problems printing out on my home printer or using color. Maybe that’s because I just bought a brand new one, a Canon PIXMA MX922 which works like magic.

Put a thick coat of the Liquitex on the canvas. Thick is good.

Smoosh the print out COLOR SIDE DOWN on the Liquitex-coated canvas. Your picture will be reverse, which is important if you have words. As the liquidex dries, the image will start showing through.

Wait for it to dry. Seriously. Wait. A long time. Like, overnight. I actually put a thick dab of the Liquidex on a paper near the drying canvases and I would poke it to see if it was dry yet. It gave me something to poke rather than the canvases. Six hours is probably a good guess of how long it took.

This is what happens if you try to rub the paper off when the Liquidex is still wet. The whole thing comes off. 🙁

When the canvas is dry, spray it with water from a spray bottle. Then use your fingers to rub the paper off. It takes some rubbing.

This is what it looked like after I rubbed. I sprayed again and rubbed some more. Rub gently so you don’t damage the piece, but enough to get all that paper fiber off. You can see it when it drys, then you rub some more.

After the paper is off, seal the canvas with a thin layer of Liquidex. I did it while the canvas was still damp. Turned out great!

I have Amazon prime and ordered all my supplies from there. No shipping costs. I love it. It saves a trip to the store only to find they don’t have what you need. I may never go outside again!

I am very happy with the final result. It makes my kitchen instantly hipper and cooler. (I hate my cabinets. Don’t judge me by my cabinets.) What do you think?

My DIY – Fun Instagram Type Photo Canvases of Tasty Food – With Instructions