Create your own Paint Drip Pencil Pots

I’ve always appreciated the decorative potential of paint dribbles, and this project uses that most everyday of items – the tin can – along with translucent glass paints to provide pen/pencil/brush holders that have a painterly beauty all of their own. Because the glass paints are translucent, they allow the metallic sheen of the tin can to shine through, giving the colour a luminous enamelled effect.

These are really simple to create. Having removed the original label from the can, I cleaned off the glue using white spirit, which polished up the can quite nicely, and then just painted a rim of colour around the top with a fully loaded brush, allowing the paint to drip down to create the dribbles, being careful to keep the can upright at all times. Somewhat weirdly, I did find that even within the same paint range, some colours were runnier than others. Ideally you want a paint that clings enough to give good colour depth on a vertical surface, but runs enough to create some dribble.

I also tried painting an entire can with the paint – this looked pretty good too, though getting even coverage of the paint was a little tricky. (I should perhaps point out that the blue one was painted by my 5 year old). I labelled these using the printable frames I created a couple of weeks ago for the Children’s Art Cards. You can find a printable template there.