DIY Gradient and Tribal Flower Pots
If you feel like you never have enough pots for flowers or houseplants, this is a cheap way to make some cute ones yourself. You can turn old yogurt buckets into flower pots by covering up the original text and pictures with acrylic paint and removing the handle.
If you eat yogurt a lot (I do, with berries) and have a lot of these 1 liter yogurt buckets, you could make themed flower pots for different seasons (like red, green and gold for Christmas and pastel colors for spring). You can also use these pots as pencil holders etc. for desk organization. Watch the video tutorial or read on for tips and ideas on decorating old yogurt containers.
I decorated a few yogurt buckets with collage technique a while back and learned a couple of tricks since then. The yogurt containers I used are 1 liter buckets, which is a good size for flower pots.
Before painting the bucket, you should prime it with gesso to prepare it for acrylic paint. I didn't do this with the pots I made before and they required several layers of white paint to even somewhat cover up the original pictures and text. Gesso prevents the paint from soaking into the surface so you'll need fewer layers of paint to get the same level of opaqueness. You don't need gesso for store-bought canvases, but if you're painting on plastic or unprimed wood etc., it's better to use it. I used Liquitex Basics acrylic gesso and the instructions say to let the surface dry for 24 hours minimum after gesso.
If you're painting on a non-porous surface, the gesso might not spread evenly (it might escape some areas) and in that case you should sand the surface lightly before gesso. I tried sanding for a couple of the pots, but it really wasn't necessary. The print part of the yogurt buckets is not that smooth and slippery so gesso spreads fine without sanding.
Another way to maximize the opaqueness is to go over the yogurt bucket with nail polish remover. It does get rid of a lot of the print. And then you can proceed with the gesso layer and painting the bucket.
Gradient Flower Pot
When painting a gradient, start with the lightest color and work up to the darkest shade. I had one pot of white paint and I mixed purple in another pot (ultramarine blue + crimson red makes a pretty nice purple, this video explains how to mix the perfect purple). I painted the lower part of the bucket white, then mixed a bit of purple with the white, painted with that and mixed in a bit more purple and so on working up to just the purple with no white mixed in.
Striped and Tribal Flower Pots
Start with painting the base color (preferably lighter color, because you don't want to be painting over a dark color with a light one later) and let it dry. Then mask out stripes or triangles with painter's tape to get straight and sharp lines. You probably don't want to mask out very intricate patterns because the shape of the bucket (narrowing downwards) makes that difficult. Paint the areas between the tapes with a darker color. Finally after removing the tapes, you can add some freehand painted shapes. I made a purple pot with round shapes, a green one with a tribal pattern and a blue-gold-black one with triangles.
Most of the acrylic paints I used are Crelando paints. They're cheap paints sold in Lidl and I have to say I really like the greens and blues in this paint set. I wish they had included information about what those shades were called, though. I bought the gesso from Clas Ohlson, which is more of an electronics store and I never knew they had art supplies too (until I googled where to buy gesso). For more info on the acrylic painting supplies I use, check out this blog post.
Tip! Acrylic paint dries fast so if you plan on using the same mixed color again later, you can mix it in a little paint pot or a jar you can close. That way you can mix more paint at once and it won't dry out, when the lid is closed.
These are the four finished flower pots:
If you want to know how to make these collage flower pots, click here. I also have a lot more recycle craft ideas here.
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