Oh Amazon, you have so many thing to inspire me! I've been admiring trendy plant pots with a face on them; the plant sticking out the top of the pot is the hair. The terra cotta pot holding my aloe vera has split, so I need to repot it. Unfortunately, it's a big pot, 8 inches in diameter! I haven't found a pot head on Amazon that is so large. So, I thought I'd try my hand at painting my own. Here's what I did.
1) I ordered a plain terra cotta pot, 8 inches in diameter from Wal-Mart. It cost about $3.50. Then I wiped off any dust, inside and out, with a damp paper towel and removed the bar code.
2) After the pot dried, I used some masonry sealer on the pot, inside and out. I believe the brand I used is Drylok. We had it left over from a repair job at out old house. I needed 2-3 layers to get it sealed and I had to wait at least 3 hours between each coat. This was a pretty time consuming step.
3) The sealer has some grit in it. I thought about sanding the grit off, but it gave the pot a nice texture. Just make sure you are not using a foam brush because the grit pulls pieces of the brush off. You could sand it at this point if you don't like the grit.
4) Next I applied 1-2 coats of white, acrylic, craft paint. The pots in my window are white, so I wanted this one to match. Of course, you have to wait an hour between each coat.
5) I'm not the most confident painter, so I pencil sketched the features of my pot head's face. Then I used acrylic craft paint to paint her features. I recommend thicker paint. The paint for the red lips was really liquidy and ran when I set the pot down. It took a few coats of white to cover up the error. Most of the features took two coats to get the color intensity I desired. I used a cotton ball to get the blush for her cheeks and a q-tip to get the black pupil in her eye.
6) I did not attempt to paint the outlines of the facial features. I used a black paint marker instead.
7) Once the paint was all dry, I covered the entire pot with clear polyurethane.
8) After the polyurethane cured for a day or two, I planted my aloe vera inside the pot.
I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out! If you make one, post a picture of it.
