Challenge Your Creativity

What’s in the Box? Series

Welcome to “What’s in the Box?”! Our weekly blog post series comprised of small projects for your inspiration and to peak your imagination. The subheading of our series is “Challenge Your Creativity”, but this week we thought we would make it the title of our post. Why, you might ask? Because the main point that was taken away from this week’s box was just that. Challenging your creativity, being bold enough to try something new, playing around with things until they feel right!

If you’ve been following along, you probably already understand the rules of the series and are on the edge of your seat waiting for each weekly post! For those of you who are new around here, check out this post here to read up about the series and how you can play along! If you know what this is all about, continue reading to learn more about how you can challenge your creativity.

So, let’s get to it, shall we? In this week’s box, you can find the following products:

Cannonball Plaster

Fresh Mint Paint (new color!)

Copper Metallix

White Vintage Antiquing Wax

If you’ve read through all our other posts in this series, you’ll realize that this is the second time the Venetian Plaster makes its way into the box! Give Venetian Plaster a whirl if you haven’t tried it out before! It’s a thick paint/plaster that’s super versatile and eco-friendly!

For the love of plaster

In this week’s project – a glass cubed vase – the plaster was spread on thick with a plastic knife. Imagine spreading peanut butter on some bread! Alright, maybe spreading chunky peanut butter. That someone mistakenly stored in the fridge. With that imagery in mind, the plaster has a thicker consistency, but in general is simple to apply. The plastic knife in this case offered some amazing texture and dimension that a putty knife couldn’t have accomplished. That being said, the plaster can be applied however your heart desires.

Our painter commented to us,

“There are soo many different ways to use one product and there is no right or wrong way. You don’t need fancy tools nor do you have to be a professional plaster expert to create something funky and different. Any of the tools you have at home will work!” 

So when you’re working with plaster, have some fun with it! Use different techniques to apply it. Maybe slap it on real smooth then press some bubble wrap onto it for a nice pattern. Or perhaps you have some cool patterned stencils that would imprint nice designs.

Let the piece speak to you

With the fear of sounding a little crazy, allow your projects speak to you! Commenting on this project, our painter also explained,

I never know how a project is going to end. I let the creativity flow and allow the colors to come together in a way that works. I actually was just going to leave [the vase] black and thought it looked dull, so I just started putting colors on it.  I guess that’s the part of the process.

After noticing that black plaster wasn’t going to cut it, she used the rest of the items in her box to add a special touch. After drying the plaster with a blow dryer, she used the Fresh Mint paint, the Copper Metallix, and the White Vintage Antiquing Wax, dabbing on dimension and style.