For homeschool art a few weeks back we busted out some canvases we had in the garage. I buy them in packs. They paint on them and then about a year later we gesso over them and use them again. Sometimes they want to keep them, but more often than not, they are ready move on. This is great because we have about 10 rotating at all times and it saves a ton of money. Canvases can seem so permanent, and sometimes they are, but it can be really freeing to just paint white over the whole thing and start fresh.
I was looking on pinterest and found a technique for a faux stained glass. This is sort of like that, but we didn't have any colored glue sticks. I had them lightly sketch in pencil a very simple design on canvas. We looked at some actual stained glass images for an example. Then they traced the lines with a glue gun, then painted the glue lines black. This looked really messy, but the acrylic paint applied afterwards covered the black messiness. After that dried, they painted in the shapes in solid colors and added chalk pastel for blending, which made a huge difference and really made these look magical. This all took a few stages, over two days. It was very fun.
We are in full holiday craft/cooking mode around here. We had a few curve balls last week—Pete working very long hours unexpectedly, the norovirus hitting all of us at the same time during the ballet shows the girls were in, and a very long and annoying power outage during our planned tree decorating, but we made it though! We were so sick, though, I had to throw out a rug, it was that bad.
