Doors for Charity

I was asked to paint some doors for a local charity gala. I wish I could say that my contribution for this  event would directly be raising money. But it's not. This is more of an aesthetic donation... a sitting-in-the-background-and-being-pretty donation. Decorations are important too :)

The doors I was working with were these old closet doors. Their purpose is to hide some unsightly items.

I was asked to paint them in a Japanese theme. Things that come to mind are: bamboo, cherry trees, and other nature-like things. Like this:

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Selfishly, I didn't want to spend more than a few hours on this project, so I went with a simple cherry tree theme. Here's the little sketch I drafted up. Yes, there are all sorts of copyrighted images. I get it. But this is for charity. It's cool.

First step was to paint the doors black. Luckily we had plenty of black paint left over from the garage project. And it was glossy. It was pretty much made for this project.

Before starting I debated with myself if it would be easier to start with a black canvas, or sketch out my image and then paint around it in black. The black canvas won. However, I knew I was going to be in for a couple layers of the white paint. Luckily they make paint for that purpose. It's called primer. And we have lots of that too!

And so i started painting away. It's actually quite fun to paint on such a large canvas. I need to do this more often. After one coat, my painting was looking as expected: streaky.

But a few coats later: success.

Step two was to add a bit of color. I rummaged through my paint box and found some paints to do the job.

Oh, wait. Backup. I did go back and prime out some flowers. This helped the red color pop more than it was doing directly on the black. And here we have it. All done.