Belated Bastille Day Celebrations Begin!

Bonjour DIYers! So I know that Bastille Day was officially on Monday but we didn't have much time until this weekend to begin the festivities. Jason and I are already prepping for a major French-o feast tomorrow but that post will come after the bazillion calories have been prepared and consumed. I wanted to start the festivities off with a project I did a while back but is very appropriate for the holiday. Originally, I saw the most adorable towel at Anthropologie; you might have seen it before:

freaking adorable

Welp, I wasn't about to pay $42 for a tea towel, plus I wasn't even sure how I would decorate a room with a tea towel so going off of the original idea I decided to create a fun wall canvas for our guest bedroom (that just happens to be francais-themed). I had a largish square canvas laying around so I started by painting it red, white, and blue in the order of the French flag:

not too much talent necessary for this step

Because I wanted to give the room a bit more of a "rustic" French theme I white-washed the canvas after letting it dry. To do this you add some water to a bit of white paint and mix. How white-washed you want it is up to you but try with more water at first and see how you like the look. You can always paint over it with the red or blue:

white-washing gives the canvas a little more of a distressed look

Now comes to the part that you might need a little more painting prowess (or just be good at copying things like me!) I don't trust myself on the first go so I decided to paint the Frenchie Bulldog on separate sheets of canvas. I used tear out sheets of thin canvas pictured below:

Comes with 10 sheets, plenty for screw-ups

I found a generic picture of a Frenchie that I liked the pose of and decided to start with the head first. This is really where you can artsy and add whatever details you'd like. I started by drawing in pencil and once I got the head shape that I liked, I added French details and painted the face:

scary!

wouldn't be complete without a mustache!

While I set the head aside the dry, I started on the body. Again, I just drew by hand in pencil going off of the original picture, then added the French details:

Now for the easy part!! All I did was cut out the body and the head and modge podged the whole thing to the French flag canvas! Easy Peasy!!! I apologize for not taking pictures of the lettering in progress but I just printed a font that I liked the look of in the same size that it would be on canvas and copied it by hand as best I could, then followed in black paint. Voila! A custom art piece for a fraction of the cost of a towel!