Remember the other week when I posted about this craft featured in Country Living? Well, this past weekend I bought some mugs at Pier 1 and tested it out.

Here are a few tips I learned from the process:

1. Put your first coat on thin.  I initially did it fairly thick and the paint ended up drying on the stencil in spots and not taking to the mug.

2. After painting, remove stencil. This sort of plays into tip number one. After I did the first coat, I left the stencil on and applied the second coat. When I went to remove the stencil a few hours later, some of the paint peeled off the mug because it was mainly adhering to the stencil.

3. Embrace imperfection. I guarantee the people at Country Living went through 87 mugs before they had those five perfect images to display in a photo op. Embrace the flaws. If you’re a perfectionist I recommend you only look at the mugs from far away; or you could only drink cocktails out of the mugs—that way you’ll have blurred vision and won’t notice imperfections! Genius.

4. Crabs are tough! Think long and hard about whether or not you really want a crab mug. Those legs are killer…

5. Don’t use the mugs right away. Most ceramic paint will tell you to wait 10 days. Follow this advice, otherwise you’ll wash away all your work!

So those are some tips for crafters who attempt to do this in the future. Here’s a photo of how mine turned out:

I did two crabs, a pig and a cow. I have to say the crabs are my favorite. Maybe it’s because of all the blood, sweat, tears and wine consuming that went into making them.

UPDATE: I accidentally washed one of these mugs in the dishwasher and the paint came off.

Last week I shared a project I was working on, which was to do a pixel canvas painting of Jackie O. This is a great DIY project for anyone that wants a unique art piece in their home. I will say that it requires a little time planning and some patience while you’re painting, but the end result makes it all worth it. Here’s how I did it.

1. Select an image online (it can be in color). Note: I like to do these in black/white so my instructions will be for that type of an image. You can do this in color, but matching the paint colors to the photo will be a little trickier. 

2. Save image on your computer. Crop the selected area you want to paint. Instead of doing the whole face, I like to cut it in half and do one side for a unique perspective. Once you’ve finalized it, click save.

3. Go to www.heavymural.com. In the upper left corner, click “Choose Your Image” and upload your photo. If your photo is in color, select grayscale. As you can see in the lower left hand corner, you can select how many pixels to have in the image. The more pixels, the more in focus the image will be. Now, depending on the size of your canvas, I like to go with numbers that are divisible or close to the dimensions of the canvas. For example, the canvas I used for the Jackie painting is 12 x 24.  The pixel dimensions I chose for this one were 41 x 84. Not quite an exact number, but close enough. Once you have finished determining how many pixels, save the image to your computer.

4. Grid the image. The picture you’ve finished pixelating is going to be your paint-by-number guide. Here’s how you do it. The grid is already created for you by the HeavyMural software. All you have to do is define the lines in word/adobe acrobat by drawing more distinct lines to grid it. The easiest way to do this is to copy/paste the image in a word file and stretch it to fit on one page. Zoom into the document. Under “Insert” click “lines” and draw a line from top to bottom/left to right of the image. Now, reference back to the dimensions you selected in heavymural (if you don’t remember you can count the number of pixels from top-bottom/ left-right to figure this out). This is to help you assess how many pixels to fit into your 1’’ x 1’’ square when you paint. For the Jackie painting, it was 3 pixels by 3 1/3.  You don’t have to be perfect, just close. Once you’re done, print the image a couple of times to reference while you’re painting.  After you’re done this is how it’ll look:

5. Next you’ll want to gradient the colors. On one of the print out grids, you’re going to label each pixel square with a number (I counted about nine different shades when I went through and looked at how many shades are in my image). Start from one end and label each with a number 1-9. This is tedious and took me at least an hour to do. Once you do this though, the hard part is over!

6. Take your grid map with the numbers and apply it to your canvas. With a ruler I drew lines to make the canvas a 1 x 1 grid.  The next step is to break that down further and put in the numbers for your paint-by-number painting. This process ended up taking me about 1 1/2 hours.

7. Begin painting!  I bought 3-4 paint colors (white, black, and a few shades of grey in between). Mix your colors 1 through 9 and start your paint-by-number!  This is what she looked like about half way through. As you can see, it requires a bit of patience.  When you’re so close to it, it’s hard to see it looking like anything but squares of paint.

After 3 hours of painting, this is how she turned out:

I really am pleased with how it looks! I sort of think it’s hard to tell if it’s Katie Holmes or Jackie O. so I’ll probably do a painting of JFK just to make sure there’s no confusion!

So there you have it. Your very own step-by-step instructions on how to create a paint-by-numbers painting!

Country Living came up with a great craft idea to dress up plain dishware. For more on how to do this simple project, visit Country Living! 

Cow stencil | Sheep stencil | Pig stencil

For dishwasher-safe paint: JoAnn‘s

Image: Country Living