handmade christmas gift

my sibs and i exchange names for christmas (as i'm sure everyone else in the world does) and this year, i got one of my sisters who had just had a baby. i had seen this idea in restoration hardware and knew i could make it my own. i got a few different ideas of what i wanted the stork to look like from etsy and settled on one i liked. i sketched it out first (above)...

...got out all my supplies, cut a piece of paper to the same size as the canvas so when i drew on my design, it would be the same size it needed to be for when i transferred it to the canvas ...

...and then drew it out again onto a bigger piece of paper that i could cut out and use as a template for when i needed to trace it onto the canvas. i had fiddled with several different versions of the stork's body and wasn't entirely sure that this one would work because of the legs running through the text.

so i changed it so the stork was in flight and the legs weren't interfering with the words.

i traced my template onto the canvas and started painting. the word "walter" was printed from the computer but the other words were freehanded.

i typically mix my own paint on projects like this which allows me to get it to the exact color i want. but then it's impossible to match it again when i need to do a second coat. you can see in the last picture that the blue isn't even all the way through. but whatever. it took me a while to decide on a color for the stork's little sack.

i finally settled on gray for the sack and voila. done.

it was a fun project to get wrapped up in-and when i'm making something for someone else, it's always more fun because then i anticipate their reaction. i'll definitely try something similar to this again (but not exact because i want my sis to have the original).