Silk Road Needle Arts

                        St. Petersburg, Florida

Back to Tips        Home

Painting Your Own Canvases--

It can be very exciting to paint your own canvas for needlepoint. Shops offer entire classes on this topic, so we can only offer some of the basic tips here on the web site.

Needleart has to be more stylized and representational than traditional artistic painting. The canvas imposes limits on size and "movement" of designs, and the threads limits the color selection. In needlepoint there are no true curves, but rather stepped lines.

Most artists use acrylic paint. It dries quicker, is easier to control, and cleans up easier. The consistency of the paint should be like cream and the paint should not clog the holes of the canvas and not run on the back of the canvas.

There are a number of ways to transfer a pattern to canvas. You can sketch the outline lightly, preferable with an artist's HARD pencil; you can also use permanent ink markers, but be aware that dark lines will show through light threads (the voice of experience talking here.) You can also make a tracing of the design on paper and trace over it onto the canvas. If you intend to re-use the traced design, you may want to consider using clear Mylar to create an original "template."

If you are painting the canvas for your own use, you can leave out details and refer to your original as you stitch. In general, you should limit your color range to a manageable number of colors, preferably to those for which you can find matching colors. When mixing your own paint colors, you can create literally millions of colors; we have over 5,000 colors of threads, but still have problems matching some canvases exactly. Some of the commercially painted canvases are truly exquisite; but in a number of cases you will need to find a close match in a thread color; and if you want the tonal shadings, you will probably need to work in a pliable thread so that you can blend in the needle to create additional shades.

Paint dries darker, so if you are trying to match threads, you should do so with a paint sample that has had a chance to dry. (Also, when stitched, threads look darker, hence making it almost impossible to match threads after they have been stitched.)

The paint color should serve as a general guide to thread color; you can go 30-40% darker or lighter when you stitch and get the same effect.