DIY – The Painted Owl

I know we’ve all seen the cute owl decor that has become so popular the past few years, and Jonathan Adler has popularized the white porcelain animal figurines.

Here are some interesting and diverse inspiration pieces I found:

1. Elephant, Z Gallerie; 2. Owls, West Elm; 3. Hare, Lighting Showroom; 4. Dachshund, Jonathan Adler via All Modern; 5. Baccarat Midnight Bear, Neiman Marcus

I have a weak spot for these things and just had to include that beautiful midnight bear in the mix (slightly out of my price range, haha).  I worked a family garage sale this weekend and this little owl was getting tossed with everything else that did not sale, so I grabbed it and a few other things just to see what we could do with them.

Hmmm… We’ll see. First check to see if he is valuable.  You would be surprised which items are worth $60 to $200 and might choose to find them a new home rather than painting/ altering them . So I take a close look at his mark, which reads “Byron Mold, B4″,

and do a quick search and discovered this guy . This is just one of those paint your own ceramic molds that were fairly prevalent.  I found several images and none of the coloring seemed consistent or similar to mine.  So I figured that someone already painted it once, it wouldn’t hurt if I painted it again.

As far as do-it-yourself goes, this is about as easy as it gets. I grabbed some industrial gloss white spray paint that I had on hand and a cardboard box.

• Open up cardboard box and lay in the least windy outside area you can find on side so top is facing toward you.
• Place object in box on top of something to elevate the base a bit. This also allows space for your to turn the object from the bottom to avoid paint on your hands.
• Shake your paint and spray several light and even coats all around.  Be sure to spray different angles for objects that have lots of texture and bumps like this one.
• Let dry! Very important to just let the thing sit in place and dry.

He is somewhat more serious than those cute West Elm owls (not a bad buy at $13, but only half as tall as my garage sale find), but I still like him.  Total cost: $0!  If I had purchased him at the garage sale, he was $1 + $4 – $6 for spray paint, so a real total might be $7.  Not too bad for a white owl (he’s about 13″ tall, so decent size for shelf decoration).  He would look great on a white painted bookshelf with a saturated paint behind him.  Think magenta, teal, or eggplant.

Here’s another side-by-side:

I was going to try and find a home for this guy, but I’ve started calling him Harvey and once creatures get named around here, they tend to stick around.

Roxanne D

A self-employed home renovator and interior designer, Roxanne is living in her third 1920s-era home in one of Tulsa’s oldest neighborhoods. A small-town Oklahoma girl at heart, she has also lived in Australia, which helped inspire her love of design. Roxanne loves sewing, knitting, crocheting, repurposing furniture and salvaging architectural pieces. She loves to tackle a do-it-yourself project, no matter how small or large. As our very own “granola girl”, Roxanne dreams about designing everything from dresses to gardens to her day, whatever comes across her path.

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