How to Transform a Miniature Wooden Birdhouse with Acrylic Paint

Do you love the outdoors, almost as much as the birds? This miniature birdhouse, covered in forms from nature, will probably end up gracing a shelf in your house. It might also make the perfect, unique gift for a friend. Poor birds!

Steps

1
Buy or gather the supplies you need. Buy an miniature 3 x 3 x 3', unpainted, wooden birdhouse at the craft store for approximately a dollar. Also, buy containers of gloss acrylic paint (2 oz. size) in primary red, yellow, blue, green, orange, violet, brown, black and white. To prime the birdhouse, get a 2 oz. container of matte white acrylic or an aerosol can of matte household enamel. Buy a sleeve of assorted brushes marked "all purpose" or "for acrylic."
- There are some other supplies you'll want to gather from around your house: Get white plastic picnic plates (9" size) to use for your palette, a 32 oz. plastic yogurt container for a water bucket, newspapers, rags torn into 12 inch (30.5 cm) pieces, or a roll of paper towels and, an old shirt for a smock.
Allow to dry thoroughly.
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Go outside and look around for natural items of varying shapes, sizes and colors to use as inspiration for the design you will paint on your birdhouse. Flowers, leaves, vines, grasses, birds, butterflies, insects such as a ladybug, and do quick sketches or tracings of them onto a sheet of paper.
If space runs out, simply continue on the next plane, running the design over the entire house. Pull a small shape from the images you've drawn on your house and repeat it around the eaves, door hole or front of the house.
5
Set up your palette by squeezing a small amount of paint around the rim, the entire circumference, of your plastic plate.
- If, for example, you have pink blossoms appearing in many places over your birdhouse, pull some white paint into the center of the plate and add a touch of red. Stir to make pink. Mix enough to paint all the places that need to be pink. If the paint is too thick to apply easily, use your brush to dilute it slightly with water. Rough the color in, painting all the pink shapes at one time while pink is on your palette.
- Move to a clean spot on the palette and continue mixing colors and applying the new color to all shapes that need that color. The time for detail will come after the entire house gets its first coat of color(s). Allow to dry.
- You will soon find the mixing and painting process becoming second nature.
When the entire house has at least one layer and no primer is showing you can begin to work on refining your shapes. Details will go fast with a small, pointed brush, but try to resist outline everything. If an area needs re-working or a color needs correcting or changed, acrylic paint makes this easy. Just allow the work to dry before painting over earlier layers.
Turn it over and sign your name on the bottom, and, if it is to become a gift, write few words.
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Tips

Wash brushes with soap and cool water and dry flat on a clean rag or towel. Never allow the paint to stay in the brushes. When not using a brush with paint in it, set it in the water bucket. Hardened acrylic paint is permanent.
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To mix colors, always start with the light color on your palette and gradually add the darker one(s.)
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Never leave the primer showing. Even if the area needs to be white, paint it with acrylic white paint.
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