Easy Valentine Craft: Painted Canvas Hearts

Painted Valentine’s Day Craft

These fun and easy Valentine craft paintings were a simple project for the holiday.

A million years ago, I was a Visual Arts major in college and spending hours of my life happily painting away in a third floor studio. What I loved most about my painting time was the chance to create more abstract paintings that were less about the content and more about the materials and the process. I learned that my style was “painterly” which means “characterized by qualities of color, stroke, and texture rather than of line.” In other words, I liked to use a ton of paint. Today I’m sharing one of my painting hacks with you and the single material that makes it possible. You can make a fancy looking gallery wall in under and hour and here’s how.

Materials

• Craft paint. The cheap kind.
• Acrylic Gel Medium. This is the secret ingredient.
• Canvas. 
• Palette Knife  (popsicle sticks should work as well)

Step 1. Pencil in your heart

Personally, I love the look of a more imperfect heart for don’t worry if your pencil line is irregular or uneven.

Step 2. Paint the background

With white craft paint, quickly fill in around the heart. This shouldn’t be neat or careful. Just quickly get your paint on the canvas. To take the edge of the harsh white, I also picked up a tiny bit of a few different colors with my brush and quickly mixed these in. I didn’t clean my brush in between… just grabbed the paint and mixed it all in quickly while everything is still wet. If you grab too much, add more white? If you want more contrast, add more color. 

Tip: I use paper plates as my palette… it’s easier if you have a bit more space since you’re using more paint than normal.  

Step 3. Mix Your Gel Medium

Now comes the fun part. I used about 1:1 gel medium to paint and used my palette knife to mix the two together. It will begin to look like frosting which is the consistency you want.

I added globs of the thick paint onto my canvas and then went back with the palette knife and spread it around. Palette knives are fun to work with- you can use the flat edge to spread it (like frosting) or you can use the point to scrape away a bit of the paint exposing the canvas below. Mix the paint as much or as little as you’d like. I kept my palette fairly monochromatic but this would also look amazing with some contrasting colors thrown in. If you are gentle with your palette knife, the colors won’t mix together and you will end up with a fun abstract painted heart!

Kids would have a great time with this given the different textures at work! It’s like finger painting with a palette knife. You can substitute popsicle sticks if you’d like and will probably get similar results!

I have this small gallery wall hanging in our family room and will probably remove it after Valentine’s Day, but I’ll move some of the smaller canvases to bookshelves around the house so this is technically a year round project!

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