Painting Canvas for a Photography Backdrop

Buying a canvas background for a photography shoot can be expensive. When looking for an alternative, we found out about a trick of buying a blank canvas drop cloth from your local hardware store and painting it. After messing one up, we got one right. The benefits of going this route are amazing. You can pick the exact color that you want for your shoot and paint a 12ft x 9ft canvas backdrop for under 50.00!

A couple notes here so that you can avoid “practicing” as much as possible and get it right from the start. We used rollers instead of spray paint or brushes. They worked but you have to go over them a couple times and that will give you a solid color. For textured backdrops try brushes, a rougher roller or spray paint. It might be a good idea to buy a small canvas drop cloth (or use a foot or two of your 12ft side) and play around with the different types of finishes you can have. (Running a test is crucial to ensure you do not waste your time and money on something you aren’t happy with.) Ironing and/or steaming the canvas before we started helped a ton.

All in all it takes a trip to the store and about an hour of work to get custom photography backdrop for under 50.00. The canvas is thicker and nicer then a 300.00 muslin I have in the studio and it is the exact color I needed. Hope this blog helps you as much as learning this trick helped me.