6 weeks ago

I started working on a little project involving this super purple spray paint.

Here's what I was painting:

I was originally going to give these away. Understandably, I didn't like how they looked. The paint was chipping and, well, they weren't cute. I like cute.

Anyway, I wanted to spray paint them but I just couldn't find the motivation. On one particular trip to our most favourite store, I stewed over paint colours. As usual, I couldn't make a decision. But then, while we were still wandering around, I had a moment of inspiration, got my paint, and a day later, I sprayed them.



They look so great, don't they?

Um, no. That picture is all an illusion. You see, by spraying them, I unintentionally highlighted all of their flaws. The chips, the cracks, everything was about 100% more obvious.

What to do! What to do! I had some mini ideas like maybe smearing on some glue to act as a cover so once I applied another coat of paint, none of those cracks and bare ceramic would be visible.

I wasn't sure that would work, so I decided this needed a call to mom. She knows everything.

She suggested I use caulking. Just some regular, paintable caulking. Ok. That made sense to me.

So a week after, I finally remembered to buy some caulking (they sell smaller tubes now that don't require a caulking gun -- thank goodness).

I tested this idea on the worst looking duck and I'm not going to say it was 100% successful. Since I was only focusing on the damaged areas, I could really tell the difference between what I'd put caulking on and what I didn't. It was really hard to get the caulking as smooth as the ceramic. Mom kept insisting I had to take my time and smooth it and work it. Well, I tried that -- unsuccessfully -- the caulking was drying too quickly. If I even looked at it, it would ruffle up with texture. So I messed around with this duck for another week, and honestly, I was at the point where I didn't even want to bother with this project anymore.

I finally decided to cover the whole test duck in caulking. After I sprayed it, I decided that I really didn't mind the texture. It was a little more interesting than just shiny and smooth.

So instead of spending hours sanding and applying and sanding again, I put the caulking everywhere. On every surface of each duck, and I made sure the texture was nice and not ratty looking.

After a couple applications of caulking and more than a few coats of spray paint (not because the caulking was hard to cover but because I kept missing some of the harder to spray spots), here's what came out:

You can kind of see the slight texture, right?

Check it out:

I definitely would have liked them to be smooth, but I'll take this over that any day.

Now I have an even bigger problem.  I have no idea where to hang them.