DIY Painted Wooden Animals…

Last updated on 21 October 2021

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These DIY painted wooden animals are so easy to make!

I discovered these wooden animals at the charity store for just 50p each, and I knew as soon as I saw them what I wanted to do with them. One of my favourite craft ideas that is all over the internet and Pinterest, is when you get old toys and plastic figures, spray paint them and turn them into jar toppers. I thought I could do the same and create some DIY painted wooden animals!

First I sanded them down, so it takes off some of the varnish and also makes it rough and gritty, which means the paint will stick better. I just used sandpaper from the garage and gave them a solid rough-up.

You can see in this picture below that there is like a block thing there too. I don’t actually know what that is, but you put the sandpaper around it and it’s easier to use. I didn’t end up using it much for the animals, though, because there are curves and bits that are hard to get at. I also just used this white spray paint, which I bought a wee while back from Wilko for about £4. This actually ran out, so the topmost layer of paint is not sprayed paint. More on that soon.

As you can kind of see, once I had sanded them, they were all rough and grainy, which is what I wanted. Yay!

Next, I got out the spray paint and went nuts. It turns out, I’m not very good a spray painting. ‘How hard can it be?’ you probably asked. ‘All you do is point and shoot.’ True, true…but somehow I always manage to get it streaky and messy. So it was probably a good thing that I ran out of it and had to do a top coat with real paint.

 

I was in Wilko the other day, and I saw these amazing pots of tester paints.

They were having a ‘buy 3 for a pound’ deal going on, so I bought 3 pots of white, and then these other colours too. I don’t actually know why I’m showing you the other colours, because I didn’t use them for this project…perhaps just because they are pretty and I really like them. Normally, without the deal being on, these babies are only a pound each! I will definitely be getting more! I used a pottle (heh heh…’pottle’) of the ‘Magic white’ stuff to paint over the animals when the spray paint had all dried.

When they were just covered in spray paint, they were very shiny  but the white top coat I used had a matt finish. I liked the shiny look, but I think I like the matt look better. This paint was really good; when you put it on, it looked like it was pink, but as it dried, it turned white! It meant I could see where I had been, and what parts I had missed. Very handy!

And now they are all dry and very pretty! I love how they turned out, and I’m really please with my first try at painting wooden animals. I’m definitely going to be on the looking out for more! By the time the year is out, I may just have an entire zoo sitting in my craft room!

So there we have it! Painted wooden animals. What do you guys think? Like them? I was thinking at one stage that I could paint them with one of the cute colours I bought…but then I decided I really liked them in white. So white they will be!