I bought this little stack of canvases on sale intending to make something completely different for Christmas gifts (click here to see what) but then realized my Mom already had something very similar and just scrapped the idea.  So then I had a little stack of canvases just sitting around and had to come up with some way to use them.

I’m no artist though, so I had to think of something simple, some way I could paint without really having any talent.  This called for tracing and tape.

First, I painted a background color on the canvases, then taped a slightly curved outline of a tree and the larger branches with a low tack painter’s tape.  I ripped little pieces of tape and stuck them on to be the pattern of the birch bark, then painted over it with the lighter shade.

Carefully peel up the tape while the paint it still wet.

To get a bird shape, I actually traced a photo I’d taken through my window of a little sparrow.  I copied one larger size, then flipped it and resized it slightly smaller to end up with a little birdie couple facing each other.  I faked carbon paper by coloring a thick line on the back side of my traced bird patterns with a regular pencil.

I flipped it over and used painter’s tape to hold it down while I traced over the line again.

Can you see the traced lines?

Then just fill in with a darker color.

All that’s left to do is free hand some smaller branches.  Mine are maybe too small for the scale of the trees, but I thought it gave a little folk art kind of look and left it.  Besides, usually the less I mess around trying to correct something, the better the end result.  If you want to personalize it a little more, “carve” initials in one of the trees with the background paint:

And ta-da!!  You’re done!