I think you may be getting confused as to what PHP is.
You mentioned about the
canvas
element, this is front-end development, which is processed in the clients web browser.
PHP is server-side (back-end) development, all the data is built and processed on the server and then sent to the clients browser.
If you're wanting to learn PHP, then I suggest a good way to learn is to make a simple message board / forum
It should have the ability to do the following:
Login/Register
Create/Edit/Delete Topics
Create/Edit/Delete Posts to topics
Simple search
I believe making a project like this will help you understand how PHP works, and how to interact with data storage like sessions, cookies, or databases like mysql
You should familiarize yourself with
php.net as you will likely reference this a lot. You may want to go through a
Codecademy PHP tutorial too.