How to make textured canvas art with acrylic paint: 5 easy steps
Want to make textured canvas art but not sure where to start? This abstract grid painting uses acrylic paint, a palette knife and masking tape to create thick, expressive marks with clean lines between them.
It’s a simple DIY wall art project that doesn’t require drawing skills or a perfectly planned composition. The grid gives you a structure to work within, while every square can be a little different.
We made ours using the Olive Art Kit on raw cotton canvas, finished with an oak edge frame. Here’s how to make your own.
What you’ll need
Our Full Art Kits include everything you need for this piece. The canvas, acrylic paints, palette knife, masking tape, wooden paint palette and handcrafted wooden frames (along with the tools to build and stretch your own canvas first).
We used our Olive palette.
Step 1: Tape out a grid
Use masking tape to divide your canvas into a grid of squares. For this artwork, we used four vertical and five horizontal lines.
Press the tape down firmly so the paint stays within each section. Don’t worry about making every square absolutely identical.
Step 2: Load up your palette knife
Add your acrylic paint colours to a palette, keeping them mostly unmixed. We used all four paints from our Olive palette.
Pick up a generous amount of paint with your palette knife. Load more than one colour onto the knife at once to create streaks and variation within each mark. Then, start making marks.
Step 3: Make your textured marks
Press and drag the palette knife across the squares to spread the paint. Experiment with the direction, pressure and movement of the knife. Short strokes, longer drags and overlapping marks will each leave a different texture.
The aim isn’t to make every square look identical, actually the opposite. Let the colours and marks vary while keeping the overall composition connected.
Step 4: Fill the grid and build up texture
Continue until each square has its own combination of marks. Use all the colours across the artwork to keep it cohesive, but vary how much of each colour appears in every section.
Don’t spread the paint too thinly. A generous amount of acrylic paint creates the raised marks that give this textured canvas art its character.
Step 5: Let it dry, then peel off the tape
Once the paint is fully dry, carefully peel away the masking tape to reveal the clean lines between each square. The contrast between the thick, expressive paint and the exposed canvas is what makes this piece work.
Finish with the wooden edge frame and your DIY textured wall art is ready to hang.
Make your own textured canvas art
You can recreate this painting with our Olive palette or use the same five-step technique with colours that suit your home. Or take the idea, but make your own version with different shapes.
Our Full Art Kits bring together everything you need, so you can make the whole piece yourself, from building the frame to hanging the finished artwork. You’ll also get access to our Digital Art Guide, where you can follow this textured grid painting and more step-by-step painting guides.
Explore the full collection, create yours and send us photos when you're done. We would love to see your version.
Emmi
Co-founder of Plan