Tuesday 14 May 2013

Altered Hand Painted Mirror

You wouldn’t believe how many reincarnations this mirror has had to go through to get to this completed stage, in fact this is the second version, the first one ended up in the bin!
Altered Handpainted MirrorThe mirror is from Ikea – “Malma”  and measures 10ins x 10ins
Picture46Like the very first mirror I altered I used a mixture of Promarkers and Sharpie pens to do the flower doodling, drawing the basic shapes first and then using a black Sharpie for the outlining, finer details and to fill in the gaps.
Altered Handpainted Mirror 1Altered Handpainted Mirror 2
To be honest, at this stage, after a couple of coats of quick drying, gloss varnish the mirror looks pretty OK, but me, being me,  just had to fiddlefart some more …. which is where I went wrong with my first mirror, hence the bin!
Altered Handpainted Mirror 3Altered Handpainted Mirror 4
I really like the effect of adding a white outline, but getting the right pen that stayed put while being varnished was a problem, the first couple of pens I tried dissolved immediately ….. however I found that a white “Pilot Super Colour Permanent Type Ink” held fast …. wooo hooo, but although it is labelled as “extra fine”, I would have really preferred it to be even finer …… but that’s me being very picky!
Altered Handpainted Mirror 5Altered Handpainted Mirror 6
The final stage was to mix a generous sprinkling of iridescent micro fine glitter to the varnish,  which gave the mirror a delicately sparkly fairy type look, which was exactly the effect I wanted, but unfortunately the pictures really don’t pick this up or do justice to it.  The white outlines are also much subtler from a distance, giving the mirror a softer effect not looking half as harsh as they do in these pictures. As you can see compared to the first jewelled mirror I did (behind) the detail is much finer, I have also resisted adding any gems at this stage …. for now I am going to leave it as it is and then perhaps revisit it in a couple of months time ……