Use this DIY canvas painting tutorial to make a map of your choice! From an NFL football map to a National Park bucket list, the ideas for painting canvas details are endless! Or, use this tutorial for how to paint on canvas to jump start your own canvas painting idea!

The idea: an NFL stadium map

It's my dream to see the Kansas City Chiefs play in every stadium in the NFL. I've been lucky enough to see a few games played in other stadiums already and I thought it would be so fun to have some sort of visual reminder of the games that I've seen played.

I knew bucket list art pieces were pretty popular. I had remembered researching our Utah road trip and coming across some cute ways to mark visits to national parks. From scratch-off maps to national park checklist art pieces... it sparked a great idea for an NFL football map DIY canvas painting project!

I'm walking you through the steps so that you can either make a stadium map art piece or be able to take this tutorial and come up with other cute things to paint on a canvas.

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Let's get to the project and remember, as I'm sharing about it, that you can take this type of DIY painting tutorial and make it your own (think travel bucket list, MLB stadium bucket list, etc.).

DIY Canvas Painting Tutorial

*For this canvas painting project, I'm also sharing how to repurpose an old canvas and get it ready for a new painting.

DIY painting supplies

• Canvas (I repurposed one we had on hand)*
• Sealer*
• Gesso
• Paint Brush
• Paint
• Projector
• Photoshop (or other web tool)
• Printer
• Painter's Tape
• Plastic (I used leftover plastic but you could use just about anything!)
• Sharpie
• Paint Sharpie
• Vintage Brass Pins

* If you aren't repurposing a canvas then you can skip buying the sealer and the gesso. Also, I had that particular sealer already on hand so I used what I had but there are lots of different options for sealers.

Start on step 5 if you are using a blank, new canvas!

How to Paint on Canvas

1. If repurposing an old canvas, seal canvas to lock in original art so it doesn't bleed longterm.
2. Apply two coats of sealer, giving appropriate time for drying in-between coats.
3. Brush on Gesso. Let dry.
4. Apply another coat of Gesso. If you want your canvas a lighter color, then you may need more coats of Gesso.
5. Paint canvas.
6. Print off map of United States (where it shows the NFL stadiums). You could do the same with National Parks, etc.
7. Bring the image into Photoshop and delete any areas that you don't want.
8. Size the image to 8.5x11 and add text (if wanted).
9. Print image on paper (printing on transparency paper would save time!).
10. Using a projector without transparency paper, trace the map on plastic with a permanent marker.
11. Put your traced plastic on the projector and find the distance from the the wall that shows the image on your canvas (see video for more explanation).
12. Start tracing on the canvas with a permanent marker.
13. Keep tracing until you finish.
14. Use push pins to designate where you've visited.

I know visual steps are important, so I put together a video of the NFL Stadium map DIY painting so you could see how it came together.

Easy Painting on Canvas : NFL Stadium Map

Don't you just love how it turned out? It matches what I had in my mind when I envisioned how this piece would work in our space, which isn't always how projects end up.

I didn't share how we framed the canvas and we've actually framed canvases twice now (we did it for our Korhogo textile art as well). I plan on writing about both ways we framed the art pieces soon. We did it with slightly different methods and they both work well. Until then, here's a good Canvas Floater Frame tutorial if you want to get started on something similar.