Would you get a load of this canvas? Oh, ye gods. The 90s called they want it back. The material itself is a, it's a man-made fabric. It's not canvas, it's some sort of synthetic, but it's in really good condition. It's just that the design is hideously out of date. So I figured let's repaint it. You know, you're up $300, $400 for a new backdrop, but $50 worth of paint, we might be able to give this a new lease on life. So let's give it a crack. Okay, so I've got my canvas laid out, and I just thought I should maybe share this little tip with you. Obviously, if you gaffer tape over the corner of the canvas, you're not going to be able to paint all the way to the corner of the canvas. Now, obviously, that's not the end of the world, but if you're a completist, you're a little bit OCD like me, and you want to paint all the way to the edge of the canvas, what you can do is just take a little bit of gaffer tape, wrap it around on itself, so that you've got a loop with the sticky side out. And then stick that on the back side of the canvas. Push it down, and there you go. And that's what I've done on those other corners, and I did do a bit on the top edge, but it's lifted up by obviously needed a slightly larger piece of gaffer tape. But at least that way, you can paint all the way to the corners of the canvas if that's what you want to do. Now, unfortunately, I ran into some issues with my lav mic, so I got ready to do a bit of painting, and I decided I would start by just doing the black around the edges of the canvas, and that later I would fill in the middle with the Poincyana red. And yeah, we'll see how that worked out as we go. The paint that I was using was an exterior black with just a matte finish. It was just a 1.0L tin, and that should be enough to cover around about 10 to 12 square metres, and my backdrop is only 1.8x3, so it's about 6 square metres. So yeah, plenty of paint for what I needed. I then decided to mix some of the red with some of the black, because I thought the red looked really bright in the tin, and I was concerned that it was much brighter than I was anticipating, so I thought, well, if I mix it with some black, and then fill in the middle of the canvas, that will make it just a little less bright. However, what I found was that the black really, really overpowered the red in a big way. So after I had done the middle of the canvas with this black and red mix, I also realised that as the black that I'd done in the first pass around the outside edges had started to dry, the blue from underneath was starting to show through it, so I then used more of my red and black mix around the outside edge as a second layer to basically get rid of any blue showing through from underneath. Then it was a case of using what red I had left, and just splashing it all over the canvas, which looked great the way it just dropped and splattered, but I just didn't have enough of it. I really needed a whole liter of it if I wanted to use that as the look. So I then rolled that around to cover as much of the canvas as I could, but again, I noticed that the black was really drowning out the red. So I figured, well, it is what it is, I just have to live with it, and I'll have to use the nutmeg, the small sample pot that I've got to be my highlights and to create some interest and texture across the canvas. So basically once I'd stirred the paint, I just walked around the canvas and dipping a small brush into the paint, just splattered it across the canvas randomly and haphazardly, basically so it ends up looking a bit like a painter's drop sheet wood look with just this random paint splatter all over it. Okay, I've just had a look at the quick preview on the back of the camera and I realised that you can't see what I can see here. This is looking freaking amazing and I hope that when it dries, it still looks like this. I haven't used all of that tin, I've used probably two thirds of it, and as you saw from the slumber or the sped up sequence, all I did was just dip the brush in the paint and just, you know, across the canvas. So I'm going to take the camera off the tripod now, and I'm going to bring it over here so you can actually see what this is looking like. And the thing I notice, I'll tell you once I've got it off the tripod. So just for your own interest, there's daylight coming in that end of the garage and I've got fluorescent lighting up there. So this is how this is looking, and I've got all these lovely paint splatters and you can see a little bit of that pink just coming through from underneath, and it's making me think, you know, if that look holds, if it looks like that once the paint has actually dried, it's going to look great, and I'm imagining that you could probably get another colour and just, you know, lay a more stuff on top, and yeah, I'm really liking the way this looks to the naked eye. As I'm watching the preview on the back of my camera, I'm not sure how well it's translating, but hopefully when I edit the video, it will actually show up, but I'm loving the look of it right now, with that paint splattered nutmeg colour over the top, with some of those little pink smudges that I did with the sponge showing through from underneath, it really looks quite nice. Alright, so the keen eye amongst you, those of you who use paint for a living, will have already recognised my mistake. The black and the point's yarn of red were water-based paints. The nutmeg, if I had bothered to pay attention to the label, says oil-based enamel. Of course, when I came to clean up, I tried to wash the brush out in water, I went hang on, this is not water-based paint. So that explains why it splattered in such a beautiful way, and what is going to be interesting to see is just how that will respond to being wrapped up on a roll, once it is dry, I do have a feeling that the oil-based paint will crack. Okay, so it's been about six to eight hours since I finished painting the backdrop, and I was a little bit too impatient. I hung it on the backdrop stand that I've got, knowing that the oil-based paint was still a bit wet, so it was likely to run, which it did, and I'm okay with that. It sort of added to the character and the texture, but then in the process of trying to get it down off the backdrop stand, it folded over on itself, which is kind of disappointing because being so tacky as it was, where the paint was partially dried but not dry, it's just stuck to itself, and then when we've peeled and opened, and it's just ripped, not holes in the fabric, but ripped into the paint, so I'm going to have to touch it up. On top of that, I'm thinking it's maybe just a little bit too dark, that maybe I need a slightly brighter color just to bring it out a bit, give it a bit of depth maybe. I figure, hey, this is a work in progress. I'm probably going to add some more to it as we move forward. I'm going to leave it for a couple of days, let it dry properly, and then maybe next weekend, get another coat of paint on there, and do some more textures. As I was saying earlier, the idea of just continually adding and supplementing what's there, you can just morph and evolve over time. Anyway, I know you want to see the image that I shot. I just shot a sample image with my sun max, and this is what it looks like. There you go. Obviously, I need some practice, but I thought it was a great first attempt at painting a backdrop, and yeah, I'm keen to see where it goes from here. I hope this has been helpful to somebody, and any questions or comments, please sing it out down below. All right, talk to you soon.