painting the canoe

We dearly love our trusty red canoe. However, thanks to the elements, it has turned into our trusty pink canoe. Dave and I decided it would be a fun project to paint our canoe and see if we could class up our image on the river just a bit.

 

 Dave started by pulling off the remaining sticker bits from the sides of the canoe and sanding it lightly.

 

 It is crazy to see how red it used to be!

Next was Dave's favorite part of the project--research. The canoe is made of a particular kind of plastic that doesn't take paint very well, so he had to figure out how to make our paint job last for longer than a few days. He decided we needed to prime the canoe in hopes that it would help the paint adhere better.

 The boys were great priming helpers. The primer got applied quite liberally in a few spots, so it bubbled up in a rainstorm the next day. Dave let the canoe dry thoroughly and then sanded the bubbles and repainted, and this time everything was perfect. A few days later, Dave sprayed the canoe our base color--a beautiful blue.

 The boys were not invited to the actual painting, but were allowed to come look once the paint was tacky. Jed loves that blue spray paint! We let the blue dry for a couple of days and then it was time for the decorations.

Jed was adamant that there be turtles on our canoe, so we found a simple line drawing of a turtle online and sized it as big as we could. It wasn't very big since we could only print it on our printer here at home, but it is big enough. We printed two copies onto some card stock, and then Dave painstakingly cut out the turtle's shell on one of the card stock sheets and the outline of the turtle on the other.

Then Dave took two large pieces of newsprint and cut a hole in the middle and taped the card stock inside. The newsprint was necessary to protect the canoe from the over-spray we were anticipating when we sprayed the stencils.

The finished shell stencil. I am amazed at the artistic sensibilities of my husband! He is just good at everything!

 And then it was time to paint the turtles on the canoes! Jed was thrilled that he was allowed to help. 

 We used masking tape to stick the underside of the stencil to the canoe and sprayed the outline stencil, then removed it after about a minute of drying time. Then we layered the shell stencil on top and carefully used our fingers to press the shell to the still-tacky outline so it would stick without tape.

 We did have to use some masking tape on the edge of the shell stencil (on the underside) but applying the shell while the turtle was still tacky worked really well. The more turtles we did, the better our stencils became, because they got quite stiff with the paint and were easier to work with.

And here's the finished project:

 I love the way it turned out--exactly what we were hoping for!

We got a little crazy on the back side and did some dark green turtles with light green shells, and they're fun too. We did 9 turtles altogether and I'm so pleased with the way it looks! Now it is our trusty turtle canoe!