A while ago, someone in my apartment complex was selling two small, unfinished, pine wood IKEA Malma mirrors for HK$10 each (about AUD2). I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, but when I come across something that is a blank slate, super cheap and small enough to fit in my apartment, I snap it up! I kept these in the back of my mind as I read my usual blogs and looked on Etsy for items for clients, etc. Eventually I came across this fantastic DIY tutorial post on tarting up a coffee cup, and loved the colour combination she used with the spots:
I didn’t have the right supplies to do any decoupage on the mirror frame so I knew I would have to adjust it to use paint instead. Geometrics are nice and easy when it comes to painting (using tape to get a nice line on your sections). So that was the plan for one of the mirrors.
For the next mirror, I thought I might try to do something that left the wood visible a bit. I saw this image from a google search of “geometric painted bowl” from this website here: (Note: a search for painted mirrors turned up some God-awful country crap so I switched it to bowls as I was just looking for inspiration, and I knew there are some clever people out there doing lovely painted bowls.)
Clearly, I love the pink, blue and yellow! I thought I would give it a go with the second mirror to have the wood sections showing through between the painted sections.
So I started by painting one mirror white and then taping up the mirrors. Here is the original mirror, along with one mirror taped up for the second design:
Then I taped off the white painted mirror (just a section at a time) and started to paint. I am not very experienced at mixing paints or painting small items. I really have only used paint chips or spray paint, and painted big pieces of furniture up till now. So when I first painted the wooden mirror on the right, the paint colours were all wrong. I thought I should make them a bit darker so that they would still show over the wood. I now realise that I should have just kept the colours light but used multiple coats. Anyways, it ended up looking like Ziggy Stardust threw up on my mirror:
I wasn’t into it at all. Way too clownish and it just didn’t look the way I wanted it to. So I re-taped (carefully) over it after it dried and painted out the pink to navy blue. It looked a lot better! Here is the final result for that mirror:
The other mirror worked out better. The colours work well together and the spotty print makes it so fun, I think! I just taped off each section and painted, and at the end I used a foam spouncer (a circle of foam on the end of a small stick) to do the black dots.
And here it is styled up a bit:
I gave this mirror to a friends daughter as I felt it was perfect for a little girl’s room. I hope they felt the same…
