paintylights

Something a crazy person might do:

Hand Painted Christmas Lights!!!

Colored christmas lights are kind of a little honky-tonk, don’t you think? Not that I don’t love all things honky-tonk, but sometimes you want to be a little more classy, maybe even... subtle. The story: I was painting a bookshelf and when I was done I had a brush loaded with a really nice yellow green color. On a whim I decided to paint a bulb on a string of lights I had on next to me. It was very pretty, so I kind of went to town on the rest of them. I got all crazy mixing colors and experimenting. Most anything worked really, so it was just pure fun.

And so, here’s some pretty pictures!



		unpainted bulbs (the big kind)



		Action! By the way, I used Golden brand acrylics. They are the best by a huge margin. And they’re not very expensive. The best thing is that you can call them and they have technicians! Paint geeks!



		Don’t be sad if they look ugly in daylight, they will be beautiful when you turn them on.


	The colors are a lot more interesting in real life. I have a craaaaapy digital camera. Still, I think these give you an idea of how nice it can be to have control over the color. I like to keep all the colors in one family, like peach-pink-orange-gold, for example.



	vat orange and a little diarylide yellow


			quinacridone violet, not lit up


		phthalo green on the left and anthraquinone blue on the right Interestingly, cobalt blue didn’t work very well. Which is good actually, because that stuff’s damned expensive! Actually, the most vivid colors were in the warm range. Likely because the bulbs are pretty warm colored themselves (low Kelvins).

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as usual, everything on this page is CC Raphael Abrams some rights reserved (attribution, mainly)



				Add a little water to the paint and it goes on more smoothly.


		It took all of three hours for this one to go dead. I think it’s funny that it also happened to be the one that was hanging over the ledge. Kind of like it hung itself. Oh, ah... er... Merry Christmas!