Before you dive into painting wood coasters, we gotta talk.
Here's the deal, you need to prime the wood before jumping right into painting it. If you don't, your paint isn't going to be very vibrant and it will just absorb into the wood.
So I've been exploring this wood coaster idea for a couple of weeks now. The first idea was from a friend and she asked if I could print my artwork on wood. So I started researching how I could do that on good ole youtube.
I found a technique where you print your artwork on a sheet of paper using an ink jet printer and then use mod podge to adhere it to the wood. Well that turned out to be a disaster as you will see in the video haha
So then I was like okay, I'm just going to paint on the wood and SURELY that will work since I see tons of youtubers doing that.
Well...
I tried to sketch a sunflower and paint it and the colors weren't very vibrant. Also, even after multiple coats of yellow paint, I could still see my pencil markings so it made the whole sketch look grey and dull. So that was a huge swing and a miss.
The baby blue paint was sort of promising so I slapped some baby blue paint on another coaster and it was pretty vibrant. BUT I couldn't just leave it blue so I stuck some glitter on it and ruined it.
I mean seriously it was not my best artistic moment.
THEN I thought about just layering some white acrylic paint down and then painting on the wood. and BAM that was the trick. It was just simple folk art white but man did it work. I was able to put the most beautiful magenta and peach on the coaster. I was able to blend them beautifully and it was like the skies opened up. Now we are in business.
I know that gesso is supposed to prime wood, and maybe it does if you lay three coats on and sand it in between. BUT alas, I can't find any sandpaper around here. I'm sure Lowe's has some, but it takes a lot for me to leave the house.
Anyway, I digress. So I put two coats of gesso on the magenta coaster along with a coat of white paint and it was beautiful. However, I don't think the gesso was necessary because on the coaster with the cross on it, I was able to paint just as pretty of a picture using only a couple layers of white paint.
So I think that's the trick, just make sure you slap some white paint on there before you paint your masterpiece :)
Also, if you are really feeling the wood grain look, I would use prismacolor markers. They didn't bleed for me and I was able to create very smooth edges.
So anyhoo, those are my thoughts on this ridiculous matter. It turned out good though so I can't complain. Let me know in the comments what you thought of this video!
And as always, if you like my content, be sure to hit the subscribe button! I want to help you by fumbling through things myself, that way you don't have to spend money, time, and energy fumbling haha!
xoxo
25 мар 2022
