Painting Bottles

Lately I've been trying to do some of the projects that have been hanging around on my to-do list for far too long. 

Like this one. I picked up these milk bottles in the Target Dollar Spot a couple of years ago with the intent of painting them. I'm just now getting to it. Good grief! This project is super easy so there was absolutely no reason to put it off.

 

Before beginning, I read a few blog posts on painting bottles with acrylic paint so I could see that it was going to be a very straightforward project, but nevertheless, I learned a couple of things along the way!

Painting the inside of the bottle allows you to see the paint through the glass, leaving a nice, glossy finish. It's helpful to use a jar with a lid because after squirting paint in the bottom of it, you need to shake the bottle. (And I know from experience that you should only shake a bottle when the lid is on! haha...)

 I found that cheaper acrylic paint worked best for this project because it was a bit thinner and coated the insides of the bottle very easily. In retrospect, I'd recommend squirting just a little bit of paint in the bottle and then shaking it to see how well it covers before going crazy and squirting in a lot more paint.

When you're done, take off the lid and let the bottle sit upside down overnight. During this time, all the excess paint will run out of the bottle. Turns out I had WAY too much paint in my bottle and this created quite a mess which got on the outside rim. It was fairly easy to clean up but it would be best to avoid this problem!

I also purchased some smaller (more expensive) bottles of green acrylic paint. Maybe the paint was old to begin with, but it was VERY thick and did not coat the bottles readily. I probably could have thinned it with water, but instead, I again put WAY too much paint in the bottles. The gloppier (is that a word?) paint resulted in a very thick coating which took DAYS to completely dry!

 Because acrylic paint is water-soluble, you cannot fill the bottles with water for fresh flowers. My plan is to fill them with artificial Christmas greenery. I'll share pictures when I finish them up!

In summary, I LOVE the end result and will definitely paint more bottles in the future, but I'll use thinner paint (and less of it) next time!

jp