I saw some sharpie art on Pinterest that looked really neat. The post I saw was for decorating small, white tiles, which I didn't want to do, so I went looking for something similar on canvas. I didn't find anything. I did however, find a blog about using sharpies to tie-dye shirts. Also not what I wanted but still a cool project. I decided to try this one on my own and I learned a few things.
My goal was to see if this would work well on canvas instead of the other mediums I had seen it on. So I went to Walmart and bought a 3-pack of 8 x 10
canvases for $3 total. I have sharpies laying around the house but I wanted to use new ones to make sure I didn't run out of any color (because the ones I have around are pretty old). Unfortunately, Walmart didn't have the big pack of
Sharpie brand so I went with the Bic brand. I also purchased some
rubbing alcohol and used a
medicine dropper that I already had. I made sure to set the canvas on an old towels that I didn't mind having the colors bleed on to and I think that was an excellent idea. I also elevated the canvas a little by putting it (and the towel) on some cardboard to ensure that I didn't get any color on my table.
I started by coloring lines on my canvas. I left some white space between each color to allow some space for the colors to move around without getting too mixed up. Then I dropped alcohol onto the white spaces and slightly on the surrounding color. I let this sit until the alcohol was almost dry-ish.
As you can see, after waiting, there are sill lots of white spaces where my colors didn't mix. I dropped alcohol onto just these white spaces in order to fill them with color. Again I let this sit. I probably could have filled in a few more white spaces but I dropped my dropper into my alcohol container and didn't feel like doing anything else after getting it out.
The final product is the top image in this posting which is also the image below. Like I said, I learned a few things and I have highlighted those things in my three test subjects below.
The blue circles below show where too many or the wrong colors mixed together to make kind of an ugly brown patch. I would be careful putting non-primary colors next to any other color that didn't create that color. Those colors mixing together are often (but not always, read on) what causes the brown spots.
The yellow circles highlight places where you can see my pen mark. In most cases, I think this could be avoided by coloring the marker on thicker. This is especially obvious on the last image below.
The gray circles (sorry they aren't easier to see) are where you can see my alcohol drops. This is really only an issue when I dropped single drops on just one color. It gave the canvas kind of a polka dot effect and I don't care for it. I fixed a lot of it by adding more alcohol so there would be some more interesting shapes.
The green circles (above image only) are where two primary colors came together to make another color, I really like these spots.
The orange circles (below image only) are where two non-primary colors that I probably shouldn't have put together actually look ok. The image below was my first attempt, where I could just do stuff to see what happened. I started with purple and green because I like that color combination. (Some of the colors below look like pink and turquoise - they were purple and green before I put alcohol on them. The alcohol changes the colors a bit.) I think there isn't more brown with these two colors because this shade of purple often drowns out the shade of green I used.
Overall, this was a fun project. I don't think I'll ever do anything more than 8 x 10 because of how long it would take but I think the rainbow canvas and the primary colors canvas both turned out nice.
Yes, I originally saw this on Pinterest and I immediately loved it. What's better than having a pillow with a pocket? (Ok, dresses with pockets are up there but this is still super cool.) I've decided that my nieces and nephews are getting these, plus a book of course, for their birthdays this year.
