He is a huge fan of St. Louis Blues hockey so I used that as my inspiration. I did a Google image search to start and try to come up with some ideas to try out. I ended up finding two that I really liked and decided to go with them. The first was a canvas with a painted blues jersey on it and the second was a yellow and gold canvas, with the blue on it dripping down the canvas and the blues note right in the middle.
I started with the jersey since that was going to take the most time and involve the most details. I pulled the image up on my computer, sized it correctly based upon my canvas, and traced it onto some tissue paper. I than placed the tissue paper on my canvas and traced it using a sharpie. This provided all the lines and everything since I am not even close to good enough to freehand anything.
Then it was as simple as color by numbers. I would suggest using paint pens as much as possible, esp with the straight lines and edging as it helped so much! I started with paint all over and thought it looked kind of sloppy so I switched to paint pens to clean it up. If I ever do this again I will do mostly paint pens to keep it clean from start to finish.
There are still quite a few lines that I would like to straighten and I think next time I might try to space out my own triangles and basic shapes rather than just going by the traced image but I still like the outcome and think it's different from most other Blues signs you see.
My second canvas did not go as planned. I couldn't seem to get the blue paint to look good. I tried to make actual drips and that looked gooey and gross, and when I tried to paint the drips it looked very unnatural and again not good. So I scrapped the idea and decided to try something else. Since I already had a lot of paint on my canvas I was just going to paint it over with white to start clean. I used a blow dryer to dry the messed up paint and starting brushing white paint everywhere, however most of my blue paint had not dried yet so it just ended up smearing a lot. This is when I got the idea to go with the smeared look and just started lighting brushing paint on in white, blue and gold. I found a central point the did large strokes out in the varying colors. I made sure to mix the colors while on the canvas but also left some by themselves so all the colors were represented.
Looking at it is almost looks like a firework! lol
I let that dry and then added a blues note on top. Even though it was not what I originally wanted I am still so pleased at how it turned out.
Here are the two final products side by side. Overall I think they are a great last minute present and I hope that he likes them!
