Well I've taken a bit of hiatus from this blog as of late due to illness and teething and two cranky babies. I'm hoping the worst is behind us for this cold/flu season (crossing my fingers!). I am happy to say that I've still managed to get a project or two done over the last month. Yeah! So more to come on those a bit later. The project I'm sharing today was a Christmas present for my husband (but it would make a great father's day present!). Inspired by this on pinterest I decided to try a DIY version.
Source: Pinterest
I really wanted these to be a surprise so I blindfolded my husband one evening after the kids were in bed and stuck his hands in acrylic paint and put his hand print on two 8x10 white canvases. The blindfolded part was a little tricky, but his hand print turned out pretty well.
I let the canvases dry overnight and then did our twins hand prints the next day. I first tried doing their hand prints in white like the original, but you couldn't really see them (I think because the canvas was white as well). The beauty of using canvas is I could wipe off the white prints without really damaging my husband prints. Sweet!
(If I had to do it over I'd paint the canvas a darker shade of the hand print color first, then do the adult print then the baby print in white. I think that would work.)
So I tried again with my twins, this time using a darker hue of my husbands print color. This worked great on the blue and not as great on the green (I think the green wasn't light enough to begin with, live and learn)
With two wiggly one year olds it took me several tries to get a decent print (having another adult help would've been invaluable!). Again, canvas saved me because I could just wipe off the bad print while it was still wet and try again.
I wasn't thrilled with how the green one turned out, but it was too close to Christmas to redo it so I wrapped them up as-is (er, as-was) and figured I could redo it with some help from the hubby.
Well my husband loved them and insisted he didn't want to redo the green one. So I added the text (sketched out in pencil first and then painted over the pencil marks) and sent him off with some new art for his office.
They didn't turn out perfectly, but I love them!