DIY: How To Upgrade Thrift Store Art (With Acrylic Pour Paint!)

An easy tutorial that teaches you how to upgrade any thrift store art into something more modern and fun! Affiliate links in post.

Hello, beautiful people, and welcome back to my corner of the web. Today we’re dipping our toes back into my favourite type of content: DIY!

Eventually the name “Mia” will be synonymous with hot glue and I cannot wait.’

Melbourne is back in lockdown and, while it’s pretty much my default setting at this point, I cannot help but miss thrifting. My partner and I found a killer thrift store up the road from our new place and . . . as soon as I discovered it, it was taken away.

Now, why is the one store that has managed to capture my love above any other? Simple. Because they have almost an entire room of photo frames.

This may sound weird to you, but if you’re familiar with pretty much any of my thrift flips you’ll know your girl loves a good photo frame.

SOME OF MY DIY PROJECTS WITH FRAMES:

See? Your girl clearly has a thing for frames.

However, for my latest haul, I wanted to try something a little different. Rather than discarding the print inside the photoframe, I decided to rework it into something a little quirkier!

For some reason, there was a ton of Jesus related artwork the day we went. (And I mean a ton. I actively looked for non-religious art so as not to offend, but there was nothing other than family photos . . . and I thought it would be a bit creepy to have other people’s family photos on my wall!)

Rather than taking this as sacrilege, I hope you use it as an inspiration building block. You can take this method to upgrade thrift store art and create super unique pieces! Shall we get into then?

Pin me, pin me!

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Acrylic pouring paint in your chosen colours
• Thrifted artwork

STEP BY STEP HOW TO UPGRADE THRIFT STORE ART WITH ACRYLIC POUR PAINT:

This is a shorter tutorial, so I don’t have a full blown Youtube video for it. Check out my TikTok walkthrough though – and follow me over on there for more mini DIY projects!

@crystalsandcurls

mini tutorial for updating thrift store art 🌞 #diy #acrylicpainting #acrylicpouring #thriftflip #thrifted #diytutorial #diywalldecor #diywall #craft

♬ Fake – The Tech Thieves

1. Remove the artwork from the frame
2. Decide where you want to pour paint
3. Tape off the area around that section
4. Pour your acrylic pour paints into a container, making sure that you don’t mix the colours. Each layer of paint should have a corner with each colour represented, rather than layers of one colour on top of each other.
5. Pour the paint onto the areas you want it.
6. If you’d like a dripping effect like I had, tilt your paper to encourage the paint to run.
7. Add and repeat these steps until you’re happy.
8. Once the desired look is achieved, leave the paint to dry – ideally overnight.
9. Place back in frame.

And that’s it! As you can see from the video, this is a super easy and quick way to upgrade thrift store art. And (while I’m not 100% in love with the finished product) it turned out super psychedelic and cool.

That said, I’m utterly obsessed with gallery walls at the moment – and I love the idea of slowly collecting thrifted artwork and reworking it. So this may be our first attempt at upgrading thrift store art, but I doubt it’ll be the last!

MY LATEST YOUTUBE VIDEO:

Alright lovers, we shall end at the end. I hope you enjoyed this quick little project. Would you attempt something similar yourself? Are you a fan of thrift flips? Let me know your thoughts down below!

Peace,

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