I picked up some painted canvas at the local store and decided to play. A few vectors later, and the paint is creatively burned off (and in some cases, bits of the canvas itself burned away, oops). The results? Shows promise.
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I can see some cool ideas here. Especially is you could burn through shallow depths of paint. Not sure how doable that is though.
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Since precision can burn gently enough to engrave paper without cutting through, there should be low-power settings that remove only part of the paint. I wasn’t going for that effect, obviously.
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Gotcha. I haven’t gotten my GF yet, so I can’t play around.
If you have time, I’d love to see you paint several layers of color on to a canvas and see what kind of results you can get.
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Cool technique! 
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My next plan with canvas is actually to mimic a ‘paint-by-numbers’/shaded coloring page for painting over. Results will appear when they happen.
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I am eagerly looking forward to that.
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When I first read this, I thought you meant you were going to paint a bunch of color patches on a canvas, then paint over that in white, then laser through the white to show the colors below. Seems unlikely it would do anything but char the paint underneat, but think it might be possible (got my GF and now I’m stuck in a hotel for the next 2 days so I can’t tinker)?
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Really cool!
Another great idea!
Since those are usually covered with a cheap acrylic gesso is there any chance they are not laser safe?
There is a chance, and I took a risk on it. I did not notice any ill effects either resulting from it.
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Really nice, there is a lot of potential in this idea.
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OHHH I love this- what settings did you use? or am I allowed to ask?
Hah, I tried this with pre-gessoed canvas-on-board pieces and it did not look anywhere this great. Also - smelly! Yours look fantastic. Did you notice a smell though?
Vented well, but some smell. Less than acrylic or leather, though.
@bdm: For painted canvas, I usually use:
Zooms: 1000
Pews: 50
Passes: 1
LPI: 225
(I am sometimes slow to respond, but always willing to share settings that have worked well for me.)
It does need a little cleaning afterwards, usually. I try to go between dry cloth and slightly damp with rubbing alcohol. Larger dark areas are more fragile, so want to avoid pressure (or cats sitting on it).
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(or cats sitting on it)
Can confirm, that is a problem.
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So trying to do paint layering on stretched canvas. ie: sunsets, photos etc. have you done anything like that?
Paul
You might find this interesting.
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Been there, done that