I bought this ceramic painting kit from the Halloween section of Michael's for about $3.50 on sale. You can find a lot of cute kids' craft sets there weeks before Halloween, and they're often on sale for either 40% off or buy one get one free.
The paint set the kit came with was awful, which is what you can usually expect with these kits. I have plenty of acrylic paints in my collection, though, so that is what I used instead. I mostly stuck with metallic paints to make the house brighter and more fun.
If you ever get these types of kits for kids 5 and up, I would recommend giving them better paints to use as well. Children are easily discouraged and often turn away from arts and crafts at this age because they don't think their work is good enough. A lot of children's art supplies are of really poor quality, which can lead the kids to feel like it's their fault the project didn't turn out well rather than the poor supplies.
So going back to my project, I started by painting the house with several layers of white gesso. I'm hardly an expert, but I think putting the gesso on it helped to make the surface smoother so it wouldn't absorb the paint as quickly. This would mean that I wouldn't need as many layers of paint later.
I used Artist's Loft paints and gesso, which is Michael's store brand. The quality of these paints is pretty basic, but they work just fine if you're not trying to make something really special or professional looking. One thing I would say, though, is that these cheaper off-brand types of paints aren't opaque. You can see below how I needed multiple coats on the larger areas:
Two additional layers later, it looked like this:
I stuck with the metallic paints for most of the details and chose some basic Halloween colors like green, black, orange, brown, and magenta. It's easy to mess up and get paint on the wrong areas when you're painting details like these because they're so tiny. My hands also shake sometimes, which doesn't help. It's easy to fix these mistakes if you just put some white paint or gesso on them.
The project took me a little longer to finish than I thought it would, but that seems to be the way of it when I make any sorts of arts and crafts. Altogether, I think I spent about five hours on it. I really enjoyed myself, though, and would totally make more of these in the future if I see them.
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