DIY Wedding - Guest tree

Hello! Another DIY wedding project. This one a little more complicated then the others I have posted. Complicated isn't the word actually, It's not nearly as hard as it looks even if your not crafty more like time consuming. Anyways, getting into it! An alternative to a guest book! I love the thumb print tree idea also but kinda messy with ink and such so decided to do it this way and then everyone can sign a leaf instead:)

So first off I painted the canvas all over with the color of my choose which in my case was grey. I just bought acrylic paint from the dollar store, the one i bought was too dark so i just added white paint until i got the color I liked. Wait for it to dry of course before moving on to the next step.
Ok, so I am not a drawer or an artist by any means! Seriously, I can't make stick figures look good, I'm crafty but not at all when it comes to drawing! I am saying this because the next step is to sketch a tree onto canvas. As I said I can't draw so I googled drawings of tree images and the sketched this tree and branches (not the leaves) on the canvas with pencil, in case i had to erase anything, which I did multiple times. It wasn't actually that hard to do following a sketch and it didn't turn out so bad. 
I then took a skinny paint brush, again just a simple one from the dollar store, and outlined all the tree and branched with white paint and then filled it all in with a larger paint brush. I found outlining the area first made it easier to control without getting the paint out of the lines. Of course i did in some areas so I just went over them with the grey out side color and you could never tell that I got white paint on the background.
So next is to do the leaves. I got different sized leaves out with my Cricut and used the negative. Then simply put it when I wanted the leaves to go and painted in with white (again easier to do with small/skinny brush for more control and less mistakes). You could also do this with a stencil or a negative of a paper punch you may have.
The names and date I did the same way, again cut with Cricut and used negatives and colored in with the white paint. Again you can uses letter stencils for this step.
The birds I actually did from a stamp set (I can't remember which one, sorry!) and painted over with purple paint and outlined with black sharpie. The heart is from a heart punch and again used the negative and colored in with purple paint. Once that dried I simply just did our initials with a black sharpie. And that's it! All done.
I purchased the fine tip sharpie pens for guests to sign their names into the leaves and that worked perfectly fine. :) 
Hope you enjoyed.