craftgrrl | needlepoint painted canvas ?

I'm seriously thinking about painting a needlepoint canvas for my mom as a gift. She's really into needlepoint so I think it'd be great to combine that love and a personalized bit of art. The thing is, I don't know the first thing about needlepoint or specifics of painting a canvas for it. Anyone have any insight or links?

My google searches haven't come up with anything about actually painting the canvas- just sales snippets, mostly. I'm also looking for a link to a search engine someone posted a while back, but I can't find the post in the memories. The search enging sorted results into categories. It was pretty cool, but I didn't book mark it and can't find the post!

Thanks!