I love hanging things on my walls. And doors, and dressers (there's a pink feather boa there at the moment), and anything else I can stick a pin into. Cross that with a voracious love of painting and crafting, and you get this DIY Witch's Brew Halloween Sign. It could technically be called upcycled, as I used a really awesome pre-made base with a not so awesome quote as my inspiration for this project. The beer mug on the side was just screaming to be made into a bubbly green potion!
This sign is super simple to make. All you need are some acryclic crafting paints (orange, green, yellow, purple, and black), a piece of wood to turn into the sign (if you can find one like mine, it would be that much easier. I snagged this one on sale at Ross), and a few paint brushes.
The first thing I did was painted a starting coat of black over the whole sign, except for the bubbly part of the beer. Since that would be a lighter green, I figured it would be best to keep it the white color underneath. Let the first coat dry (about 15 minutes), and add 1-2 more, until you get a solid black.
When the final coat of black is completely dry, start on the mug. I took the green paint and added a tiny bit of black to make it a shade darker, and didn't mix it completely. Swirl a flat square paintbrush around to make "bubbles". You will need a few coats of this as well, but you can easily do that by swirling more bubbles on top of the dry layer. By not mixing the green paint completely, you get a nice variation of colors and shades in the brew bubbles. They are supposed to be "toxic", right?
After the green has dried, you can paint the mug. I added a bit of black to the purple, to make a darker shade. Then I painted 2 layers of the darker purple onto the mug and handle, letting it dry between each coat. Take the regular purple and paint some mug lines. This part was really easy, as I could still see a slight elevation from the original paint job. I cheated and copied those :-)
Once the mug is dry, add some extra green bubbles so it looks as if the potion is popping and fizzing. Take a bit of yellow paint to add in some highlights to the bubbles. Imagine a light source from one direction of the sign and that will be a good guideline on where to place the highlights.
The phrase I chose for this sign is "Witch's Brew sold here, only 3 eyes of newt!". Using a pencil, draw out the basic lines for your wording. The graphite in the pencil will easily show up, so be sure to write lightly, but to where you can still see it. That way it is a lot easier to erase any stray lines. Using the orange paint, paint your lettering over the pencil marks. For the bottom two lines ("sold here" and "only 3 eyes of newt") I added some yellow highlight to the letters. Again, just imagine a light source in one direction of the sign to figure out where to put your highlights. Go over the orange one more time to make cleaner lines. For "Witch's Brew" I added medium sized orange dots to the ends of the line parts of the lettering. I then added small yellow dots inside the lines to make it pop more.
In the upper right corner, I painted a colorful little skull and crossbones. I wanted to bring the vibrant colors from the mug over to the other side of the sign. First, paint some green crossbones. After they dry, add a purple skull over the top. The skull shape is really simple, just paint a circle shape and add a small rectangle to the bottom. You can draw it out with pencil first if you like. I then added a little orange eye patch (Hubby's idea!) and some detail to the remaining eye and mouth area. Then, of course, it needed more pizazz, so some tiny yellow dots were added to the crossbones.
Once your sign dries, you can add any touch-ups needed, like where I accidentally overflowed the purple paint onto the black... :-) Let it dry completely, and hang!
Hope you enjoyed the tutorial as much as I enjoyed making it! Our sign is now hanging up on our Holiday Wall. You can find more DIY projects here. What Halloween projects have you been making? Have anything you'd now like to up-cycle into a spooky decoration? I'd love to hear!