Thursday, January 10, 2013

Painted Ornaments

This year I decided to give painting ornaments a try after seeing some beautiful pictures online. Unfortunately, there was no tutorial provided with the pictures so I tried a couple different techniques on my own.

The first technique was "squirt the acrylic paint in, replace the top, and shake." Needless to say this didn't work very well. If I was lucky, half of the ornament would end up with paint, but the other half became impossible to coat no matter how hard we shook them.

The second technique was "add a little water and shake." This was when I learned that water and acrylic paint are not friends. They don't like to socialize and will be unkind to one another if forced to do so.

The third technique was "squirt the paint in and smear it around with a brush." The worked pretty well and gave a interesting, impressionistic look to the ornament, but given the size of the brush handle it because impossible to paint the top half of the ornament.

Unsatisfied with half painted ornaments, I grabbed a few cotton swabs, bent them as necessary, and was able to finish all of the ornaments with complete coats of paint.

Grace, my three-year-old, helped me. We used a variety of colors, and let them dry in a muffin pan.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with how they turned out. The blue and green one was my favorite; it reminded me of Monet's Water Lilies. Sadly, they never actually made it to the tree. The season was over before I knew it, but I'm planning on putting them up next year.