Painting glass jars

Maisie Lo
Oct 6, 2019
2 min read

Updated: Jul 27, 2020

After buying more make up brushes than my current make up brush pot can hold, I decided I needed a new one. Because I am a poor student, I decided to use a plain glass jar. This also meant that I could have some fun designing it. I decided I was going to try and paint trees as they are simple and so can be done on a curved surface.

These are the paints I mainly used (I also used a tiny bit of dark blue mixed with green in a failed attempt to make a dark shade for the branches). Firstly, I used plain white to paint the back ground and I waited for it to dry. I then painted the branches with the darkest green colour. I mixed the green and the white to make three different shades of green for the leaves. To paint the leaves I used the rounded end of my paint brush to dot the paint on. I made sure there was not too much paint o the end of the brush so that the dots did not appear blobby and risk running or being smudged. I went over with the darkest shade of leaves first, waited for them to dry then applied the second darkest colour and so on.

The design of the pot looked exactly how I imagined! I am very happy with how the different colours of leaves turned out.

The inside (I just thought this looked cool!)

Overall, I am happy with how the pot turned out! I did mess up a bit with the 'trunk' of one of the trees but this is hardly recognisable and was down to the fact my equipment was pretty rubbish. The lines in the trunk are a bit wiry because the brush is literally £1 from wilko and I struggled to paint the lines without bristles going astray. I guess the take home message is, if you are going to attempt this, buy a better brush than I did!