rescuing scary Christmas tins::tutorial
The Christmas tag project was a bit of a favorite, so in the middle of last night's spray painting (without proper ventilation!) I decided that I needed to take pictures of this one, too.
An explanation: one of my stepbrothers is getting a very cool tshirt for Christmas (hooray Threadless $10 sales!) but I wanted to make the presentation a bit special. For some reason I started fiddling about with a tin I had stuck in my "random stuff" storage, and decided that if the hideous red and green candies deisgn could be covered, it would be the perfect size to stash a tshirt, and later to store random boyish things. I decided on the skull motif because it's easy to do and cannot be construed as feminine at all.
To start, I painted the tin metallic silver all over. Note my exquisite painting setup: I've discovered that trash bags are more flexible for covering surfaces than newspaper. You have to be careful, though, that it doesn't "bubble up" around the bottom edge of whatever you're painting.
Next I cut the stencils. I just sort of freehanded it until it looked right. The crossbones were easy to do: I folded the paper in half and did a "v" with knobby ends. Voila! Crossbones! The universal symbol for "keep away!" (13-year-olds love that concept.)
To attach the stencils, I smeared the back of the paper with rubber cement and let it dry to the tacky stage, then rubbed them onto the tin.
After that it was simple to paint on a couple of thin coats of black, let dry, and peel off the stencils. I purposely didn't apply a very heavy coat because I wanted more of a roughly done look. Mr. Skully looks highly displeased in the picture below; I don't think he likes the pink kitchen. Anyway, he's ready to be filled with cottony goodness. (Note: there's another crossbones on the back that doesn't show in any of the pictures.)
An explanation: one of my stepbrothers is getting a very cool tshirt for Christmas (hooray Threadless $10 sales!) but I wanted to make the presentation a bit special. For some reason I started fiddling about with a tin I had stuck in my "random stuff" storage, and decided that if the hideous red and green candies deisgn could be covered, it would be the perfect size to stash a tshirt, and later to store random boyish things. I decided on the skull motif because it's easy to do and cannot be construed as feminine at all.
To start, I painted the tin metallic silver all over. Note my exquisite painting setup: I've discovered that trash bags are more flexible for covering surfaces than newspaper. You have to be careful, though, that it doesn't "bubble up" around the bottom edge of whatever you're painting.
Next I cut the stencils. I just sort of freehanded it until it looked right. The crossbones were easy to do: I folded the paper in half and did a "v" with knobby ends. Voila! Crossbones! The universal symbol for "keep away!" (13-year-olds love that concept.)
To attach the stencils, I smeared the back of the paper with rubber cement and let it dry to the tacky stage, then rubbed them onto the tin.
After that it was simple to paint on a couple of thin coats of black, let dry, and peel off the stencils. I purposely didn't apply a very heavy coat because I wanted more of a roughly done look. Mr. Skully looks highly displeased in the picture below; I don't think he likes the pink kitchen. Anyway, he's ready to be filled with cottony goodness. (Note: there's another crossbones on the back that doesn't show in any of the pictures.)
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