Christmas Dollar Store Pour Painting

The Dollar Tree has been adding a lot of great wooden forms to their stock lately. Basic wooden forms and cutouts are great for a variety of projects, like our Haunted house centerpiece from Halloween and when I saw some snowflake cutouts with their Christmas decor I knew I had to use them! Taking advantage of cheap craft supplies like this means you can create some truly spectacular and unique seasonal decor for a really reasonable price! Even better, it allows you to try this like this dollar store pour painting experiment without stressing about how it will turn out. If it goes wrong you’re not out by much and when it goes right, you can bag about how creative and frugal you are!

Christmas Dollar Store Pour Painting

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Pour painting is something that I have dabbled with in the past. My first attempts at pour painting were part of a try something new post last spring and I found the idea behind it to be both fun and widely accessible to anyone with a willingness to get messy! This time around, however, I wanted to see the type of results I could get using supplies from the Dollar Tree. Because the only thing better then a fun and easy to do craft is a fun, easy and cheap craft!

Pour Painting Supplies – From The Dollar Tree

• Canvas, wooden form or another suitable base for your painting.
• Elmers Glue
• Wooden Stir Sticks (popsicles sticks or dowels will work fine)
• Tempura, Arcylic or Poster Paint. (I used mostly tempura, even found some great silver with glitter in it along with some poster paint so that I could have a second shade of blue)
• Red Solo Cups (Or anything to mix your paint in)

Supplies From Home

• Water
• Plastic sheeting or trash bag to protect your workspace.
• A large tray to help contain the excess paint
• Completely Optional – Kitchen torch or heat gun.

Dollar Store Pour Painting – Instructions

Prepare Your Workspace & Paint

Since pour painting can be a very messy project I highly suggest that your first step is laying down some plastic. Since the wooden snowflakes I was using as a base were not very big I simply laid a trash bag over the top of a large cookie tray. The cookie tray keeps the extra paint from running off the sides of the trash bag and the trash bag keeps the paint off my tray and table. Set your canvas or wooden cutout in the center of your tray using an extra red solo cup to hold it up so the paint can flow off the edges

Once you have a workspace set up it’s time to mix your paints! Pour each color into its own cup and add a few squeezes of Elmer’s glue to the top. Stir the paint and glue together until it is well mixed, the mixture will likely be fairly thick which is why we are going to add some water. Add small amounts of water at a time, mixing it as you go. Continue to add the water until the paint is thinner and runs off the stir rod pretty easily. You want your paint to move pretty freely across your canvas, otherwise, you’re going to be sitting there forever as it crawls across like molasses. Slow-moving paint is far less fun. If you feel like you have thinned your paint too much you can thicken it again by either adding more paint or more glue.

Once you have your individual colors mixed its time to combine them into your pour cup. Pour small amounts of each color once at a time into a single cup. Vary the amounts you pour, the order you pour it in and don’t be afraid to add little drops, make lines, whatever you feel like! Use a good bit of paint – having too much paint is preferable to not having enough!

Pour Your Paint

For this project, I choose to use a dirty pour method of pour painting. When I have tried pour painting before, I found this method gave the results I liked best and it’s actually the easiest method which makes it a winner in my book! Take your cup of mixed paint colors and pour it into the center of the canvas. Feel free to use random motions. A Dirty Pour is literally just pouring the paint onto the canvas!

Allow the puddle to spread for a few moments and then tip your forms slightly so that the paint starts to flow towards the edges. Tip your canvas in various directions until the entire form is covered and then set it aside to dry!

If you happen to have one available you can also use a kitchen torch or heat gun to for a few seconds on the still wet canvas. Doing this is supposed to encourage cell development however I noticed only a tiny amount of difference doing this so it’s by no means needed. You can see a comparison below, one I used a heat gun the other I did not and you can’t really tell the difference! Heat guns might make more of a difference if you added oils like the treadmill lubricant I used in my previous attempts.

Allow your paint to dry for at least 24 hours before displaying them!