USA! USA! USA!

In the spirit of the Olympics, I took on a very patriotic project. To be more honest, I've wanted to do this project for a while, but needed a printer. We finally broke down and bought one. At least we got an excellent deal on it! Other than that, I had all the materials.

 I used a blank piece of canvas that I'd gotten on sale a while ago. I started by painting it white.
*But Laura, isn't the canvas already white? Why yes, yes it is... if you don't attempt to freehand draw a map of the United States on it first.*

Learning from my previous attempt, I found a blank map of the US online, flipped it, and printed it BACKWARDS on four pieces of paper, so it'd fit perfectly on the canvas.

I then took tracing paper and outlined the states. After doing that I put the tracing paper face down on the canvas and colored over the lines to transfer the graphite. Ultimately I made some adjustments to Alaska's size. The original map I printed made it a bit too puny to look balanced, so I printed out a separate Alaskan map to trace.

 I also made a plan for the lettering. Extra points if you can see my ridiculous mistake. I labeled all the states without referencing a map, but apparently got so focused that the compass got away from me.

I then painted all of the states. I used 25 colors, so each is used twice. Here's my dining room workstation:

Once all the states were painted I took a white paint pen and filled in all the names.

After a couple coats of paint and letters, Voila!