My First Acrylic Picture

I loved art at school and was a pretty good drawer, but I never, ever got the hang of painting.  I tried oil, I tried water colour, but I never tried acrylic.

I'm sure the artists out there will say that I probably wasn't taught well, but I did learn the basics, especially for water colour and never got the hang of it.

So, I have been delighted to find that I can paint with acrylics!!!

I have used acrylics to decorate my picture frame, my mini chest of drawers and my sewing box as well as a few other bits and bobs before, but I have been far from adventurous with it and haven't used any "proper techniques".

I have started a project to hopefully sell some mini hand-painted chests of drawers and knew I needed to up my game if I want to sell them so I started looking up ways to paint certain things with acrylic and discovered a whole host of Youtubers who give tutorials on acrylic painting.  And now I am hooked.

I will write another post about my long-term mini hand-painted chests of drawers projects once I've got the ball rolling with that, but for now I want to share with you my acrylic success to motivate you to give it a go too, because it is super easy with a little patience!

So first of all, these are the reasons I have fallen in love with acrylics:

• If you make mistakes you can easily fix them, usually by just wiping it off the canvas or waiting for the paint to dry and then going over the mistakes you made.
• You can paint on practically anything.  
• Blending colours is really easy.

So here is what I've been working on...

I discovered Angela Anderson's channel which inspired me to learn how to paint daisies.  I looked up some other tutorials, in particular Allison Prior's video and played around with different techniques.

I eventually used a mixture of techniques I'd seen to create my own version, and you'll be seeing more of these in my up-coming project!

Then I decided to actually follow one of the tutorials to make an actual picture and decided to do this zen painting by Painting with Jane.

I struggled a little bit at first with shading the rocks, and it took me a few attempts... I left it over night and came back to it and I ended up really happy with the finished product.

I like the painting.  Obviously it's not perfect, but it looks good, I think.  The problems I've spotted with it are that firstly the vines look like they're in front of the rocks, which isn't really a big deal because you could be looking through the vines at the rocks, but in that case the back-ground looks like it's missing something.  Also, if you look at it as though the vines are on a level or behind the rocks I think there's a depth missing to them and maybe I should have put more vines of different lengths in there and darkened the ones I wanted to look farther away.  Also, the background looks a little bit wrong to me in terms of where the water stops and where the ground is... I think the rocks have made the ground look like it's behind them in an odd way.  But over-all these aren't major problems and it's a learning curve.

So what do you think?

Painted Mini Chest of Drawers

Today I'm going to share with you my before and afterwards attempt at decorating a mini chest of draws which I got at a craft shop.

I discovered my love of painting boxes when I redecorated a sewing box I received for Christmas last year.  Since then I have developed an addiction to painting the wonderful range of wooden boxes you can find in hobby stores.  I like finding boxes which are useful, and this lovely set of drawers is certainly that!

My mistake with this project though, was that I didn't plan ahead enough.

When I decorated my sewing box it was my first box-painting project so I was weary of starting and doing something wrong.  I drew some different designs and asked the advice of others to decide on the best design for the box before even buying the paints for it.

With the drawers I had an idea in my head but didn't do a drawing of it first and didn't mull over my options.  I picked bright colours that I really liked and just went for it.  The result wasn't bad, but it just didn't feel right and I knew I could have done better.

Here is how I first painted the box:

I loved the colours, but I hadn't considered what I was going to use it for or where I was going to put it.  These are very important questions.

Even after realising that I wasn't happy with the outcome of the box it took a few weeks to find the inspiration I needed to find a design I was happy with.

The inspiration came in the form of a little bottle of buttons!

I bought a little bottle of buttons because they were just too cute not to give a home to.  It was then I realised that the mini chest of drawers was quite obviously a buttons and thread container and then I thought it would be nice to decorate the box itself with buttons as a visual for what was inside the drawers.

I played around with the buttons, seeing what patterns I could make, and with the help of my wonderful man decided on the new back-ground colour for the chest of drawers.  Obviously I needed one which complemented the button colours, and cream seemed like the way to go.

So, I set about taking most of the paint off by sanding down the box (wearing a dust mask, of course).

 And using acrylic paint, I painted it in just the one uniform colour for both the box and the drawers.

Next, I played around with different patterns with the buttons and took some snaps to choose which I liked best:





















Next I plugged in my glue-gun and practised the best way to glue buttons with a couple of spares I had on a scrap piece of material.  This was very useful as I discovered it was better to use a pair of tweezers to apply the glue directly onto the button rather than place a blob of glue where I wanted to place the button.

Remember to always be extra careful when using a glue-gun and read the instructions thoroughly before use.











I had to be careful not to press directly in the centre of the button when securing it on the box as the glue could come up through the holes of the buttons, but pressing the edges and using tweezers worked really well.

I was very happy with the finished project and finally feel that I got it right.  I am pleased I did the first attempt anyway because I think the bold colours would work really well for future projects, such as decorating a box for a child; and now I have the photos of my first attempt to draw on for inspiration.

Here's the finished project:

So what do you think?  Was it better before or crafterwards? 

Painted Sewing Box

I received a really lovely sewing box for Christmas 2014:

However, although I had specifically asked for a sewing box I didn't really like the design of the one I was given.  So, I decided to paint it!  

It was my first time painting anything like this, but I really enjoyed it and I think it was a really good idea to make it feel like mine.  Now, not only is it a a lovely gift I received, it's something I can be proud of, and it gave me hours of pleasure creating something new.  So all in all, it was a very welcome gift.

Here's how I did it:

First of all, I made a rough sketch of the box and drew some design ideas to find something attractive and easy to paint.  I bought acrylic paint in the colours I wanted when I decided on what I wanted the box to look like.

Once I'd chosen my design, I sanded down the box to get rid of most of the paint work already on the box.  I used two different sandpaper blocks.  The first one had a bigger grit than the second one to get the paint off.  The second one I used had a smaller grit to smooth the box before painting.  

Remember to use a dust mask when you're sanding!











Next I painted the box in grey.  It needed two or three coats, so this part took a while as I had to let each coat dry before doing the next.

I propped open the doors of the top compartment with jam jars overnight to let it dry without sticking shut. 

I decided to leave the inside of the box white, so I used masking tape around the edges to create a neat line, and I put tape on the glass to keep it clean.  








I then painted my design free-hand.  










This part wasn't easy, but since I'm not a talented painter, I tried not to be too "perfectionist" about it.  I had to go over some areas more than once.  It turned out fairly well. 

Then I painted on the leaves of the trees. 
















I painted some of the leaves in the colour of the acrylic I'd bought, and mixed white to each colour afterwards to do leaves in a lighter shade.












Sometimes I had to go over the leaves more than once.















And then I painted each of the draw knobs in a colour from each of the trees.











My top tips to someone doing a project like this for the first time:

• Design something really simple
• Don't expect it to be perfect
• Be patient; allow the paint to dry properly before each coat and take time to take care of the little details, making sure the use masking tape if necessary for neat edges etc...
• If you're not using the paint straight from the bottle (ie adding white or another colour to it), make more of it than you think you'll need as it's hard to create the same shade if you run out

I enjoyed this project so much that I decided to try painting some other boxes, so look out for upcoming posts about those!