Hand Painted Old Window

Joe and I just got back from a weekend in Iowa, seeing family and my brother's new house!  Now it's back to the norm, and to welcome us all back from a long weekend, here is a nice project to ease into.

This is a very simple project, easy enough for most anyone to do--and it looks great at the end!

I bought an old window at a barn sale about a week ago. You can find old windows at barn sales and salvage stores pretty easily.  I decided that I would paint a quote on it to make it a wall hanging, so I printed off the text on regular paper, placed it on the back of the window, and taped it to secure in place.

From here, it's pretty straight forward.  I have been doing so much painting lately that I've been using some handy-dandy paint palette flyers from a hardware store to decide my colors.  It gives me clarity and helps make color decisions much more quickly.  Here is the palette I chose for this window--the frame was already that blue color, so I decided to keep that, and choose colors around it.

Thanks, Dutch Boy!


I decided to go with the green apple color and red, along with white.

I started by painting in the letters with the apple green.  The trick to hand painted letters is to not get too careful and slow.  If you keep your hand moving steadily, you get a smoother finish than if you do a bunch of teeny strokes.  Smooth, long strokes are the trick.  I did two coats to get the letters nice and opaque.

As you can see, I decided to paint the little curlycue red--for a little hit of fun (and of course to stick with my color palette).

And next, I decided to give the lettering a little more depth.  I flipped the window and painted a white "shadow" around the letters.  I used to do this when I was bored  paying great attention in high school.  Just pick a side ("bottom left" or "Top right," etc...) and stick with that to be consistent.

Looks like a mess, eh?  Yes, but when flipped, it cleans up like magic!

As Joe says, "I win."

Now, then only thing to do was clean up the edges of the frame.  The window had been painted blue while it was installed, so the sides were still raw wood.  White paint to the rescue!

I taped off the edges with painter's tape and slapped on two coats of white:

aaaaannd, we're done!  Easy, peasy.  You can do this whole thing in just a few hours, and it's pretty darn fun, too.

Here's the final picture from the store:

I'm outta here!