Monday, August 26, 2013

Little Tikes Make-Overs

I am a huge fun of taking something old and out-dated and turning it into something new and fresh, so when I came across a few Little Tikes items I knew I couldn't pass that up! I have two nephews and two nieces, one of my nephews has been nicknamed Batman so I knew when I saw a Little Tikes table and chairs set I had to make it a Batman set! I spent $10 on the set and maybe $20 at most on spray paint to make this table go from old to new in about a weeks time. Here are some before pics:

These started out plain blue, was going to keep them this color and add the red comic book POW/BAM but decided to go black instead as you will see.
Here is the table. I was going to leave this yellow but decided black would be awesome!

So I did all the hard work for you because I tried all the "easy" ways to do this and ended up failing, fantastically! I started to attempt to spray paint red onto the blue chairs and ended up getting red on more than just the templated spot. I wasn't sure how to fix this so my only solution was PAINT OVER IT! So I bought some black spray paint and went to work. I bought Rustoleum paint in black matte, I used the Matte finish because I thought that really is Batman-like. So after three coats of the chair they were perfect! Yes I used three coats, mainly because I wanted to make sure it covered! Then it was onto the table, I started with a coat of the black.

All the black drying!

I then cut out a Batman Logo into a piece of cardboard and taped it down to the table and started with the spray painting of the black. After two coats I removed the template and low and behold I had some black that ran into the parts that were supposed to be yellow. 

Here is how I first taped off the logo. I then put the cardboard template over this to block the paint from getting into the black.


This is the yellow drying.

No worries though because then I took the outline template of the Batman Logo taped that down and covered the legs of the chair and started to spray paint that part yellow. Now here is where I realized spray paint sucks when it comes to not running. After peeling off the template I found that parts of my yellow got into the black so back again we went to the black spray paint and once again black got into the yellow. Fed up with it all I took some painter pens/makers and touched up the black and yellow with those. That worked perfect! 

As you can see the yellow bled into the black :(

Here it is all touched up with paint pens!

Then onto the chairs, I templated out the POW and BANG just like I wanted and spray painted the background Red. I then took paint pens and wrote in the POW and BANG and I must say it looks amazing! I then sealed the table and chairs with a Clear Matte Sealer. I only did two coats and I'm kicking myself now for that because the paint does seem to chip. The tables and chairs still however look amazing! Here are the finished products:

These turned out GREAT!!!

The table and chairs Finished Product! My nephew Batman LOVED them!

Next time I try this (which is this week) I plan on using Krylon for Plastics Spray Paint as a base coat then use Rustoleum Spray Paint. I have heard lots of great things about Krylon being able to stick to the plastic Little Tikes uses! Unfortunately though they just don't have that wide of a paint selection so I'm using Rustoleum after that. I will be back with another blog on how that process went though just as soon as I start it. If everything works the way I plan this is going to be one AWESOME project!

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