My take on the plastic animal DIY trend

Plastic animals are everywhere when it comes to DIY blog. I’ve been seeing them for a while and I first gave it a try last summer. But I still have a bunch of plastic animal lying around, so I figured I would experiment a little more. And why not make a post out of it?

This post will actually be a kind of review of the ways I’ve made them: paint, glue…

They are all animals on top of a jar, but I’ll go on with this DIY, trying other alternative.

I start with the first on I made, a blue giraffe. This one I painted with basic paint. As you can see, the brush strokes are still visible, plus it’s a little harder to get dust off of it, compared to the other painting methods I’ll talk below. For this one, I used a glue gun and, even if it doesn’t really show on the picture, I can still see the mark of the glue. Over all, this is not my favourite one and I don’t think I’ll use basic paint and brush for this kind of project anymore.

The second one is the mint elephant. For this one, I used spray paint, which I think turned out pretty good. It’s a little glossy and easy to clean. I don’t remember what kind of glue I used for it, but it probably was glue gun too, the only difference is that I probably tried harder for the glue not to show. But I’m not a fan of spray paint in general, because I can’t use it inside (therefor, I can’t really use it in winter time) plus its kind of expensive if you buy a color only to use it in one small project like this. I know I’ll end up with quite a few mint items in the future…

The last one, and the method I preferred, is this sparkly moose. I used nail polish, which, at least in my case, gives me quite a large range of color to choose from. It’s really glossy, so it’s easy to clean. You have to choose a polish you know to be opaque enough so you don’t have to do 20 coats. This one took me three coats, and it could have used only two, but there was an area I forgot so I just applied an other coat all over it. For the glue, i used crazy glue, and it took a while to set. I ended up applying too much glue and even with the polish on top, I can still see a mat area under the moose.

So the next times, I’ll use nail polish and a glue gun (carefully, so it doesn’t show).

What about you, have you tried these plastic animals DIY? If yes, what are your conclusions? What do you suggest?