“I don’t think outside of the box; I think of what I can do with the box”
A smile swept across my face when I stumbled upon this quote on the internet. This is what exactly happened when I saw two empty cardboard boxes lying in a corner of our house, waiting to be thrown away.
I longed to make some canvas paintings for quite a while and when this box came to my sight , I decided to upcycle them into cardboard canvases and paint over them and this is what it turned out to be..
Materials Used:
Sturdy rectangular cardboard boxes – 1 or 2
Craft glue.
Acrylic paint (colors of your choice)
Scissors
Paper knife
Pattern paper (Any colourful patterned paper)
Scale/Ruler
Silver Duck Tape
Cellotape
Procedure:
Take the cardboard box and mark the centre point along the width of the box on both the sides. Draw a vertical line using pencil, from top to bottom joining the mid-points of the width. Repeat this step on the other three sides. One cardboard can make two canvases.
Using a paper knife/big scissor cut along this marked line. This line runs through the entire outer surface area of the rectangular box. Cut it carefully and smoothly and take care not to chip off the edges. Use a clear cello tape/packing tape to seal the edges along the four corners. Now you get two perfect triangular sections as shown below:
After making these two boxes, I found that the whole section can be inverted inside out so that the finished section would have a smooth surface, instead of graphic images on the outer surface. This would facilitate smooth coloring. I did this for my third cardboard canvas, but unfortunately forgot to snap a picture of the same.
Now comes the background coloring part. If the outer surface has graphic images, then always make it a point to paint the initial coating with a dark colored acrylic paint for eg., dark brown or blue. Let it dry completely.
Now paint the cardboard canvas boxes with your favourite colours. I have used three different colours here which include teal, coral pink and cobalt blue.
Again let it dry completely.
Inspired by an image from Pinterest, I chose the wordings and art design.
To write the words properly, use a scale or ruler as a guide and write the words on the canvas using a white colour pencil. Trace it over with a paint brush using white acrylic paint.
Again the most basic and reiterant step – Let it dry completely 🙂
After this, paste the silver duck tape on all four sides along the wisth of the box. This gives a nice finishing to the sides hiding irregularities if any. I used a silver duck tape.
Now to create designs on these boxes, I have applied the simple technique of cutting out petals and pasting them on the boxes.
In each of the boxes, I have pasted 5 petals cut out from pattern paper and the rest from white card stock/white papers. Once again, here also instead of using store bought pattern paper, I upcycled unusable paper bags and design sheets from old calendars.
Petal template looks like the one below:
Start pasting with the inner coloured petals( 5 nos.) and gradually move outward by the pasting the white petals in between them. Fill gaps with petals sized accordingly. Smoothen the edges after pasting to give the perfect finish.
Go ahead and hang these simple wall art to adorn the walls of your house.
Have fun!
