First, assemble your supplies. I bought two little people in a package for $1.99, plus these little jar shaped wooden "cat" bodies, and some little balls to use as their heads. I also found a little wooden bead from Michaels that I wanted to use as a little bun on the back of my bride head. I may or may not have squeezed it out of another package because I didn't need 20 of them for $5. Don't follow my bad example boys and girls.
Next, get out your drill and drill a little hole into the bottom of your bride and groom. I cut a bamboo skewer and then sanded the ends with a nail file to stick in the hole. This gives you a pick to stick in your cake, but also an easier way to hold it while you're painting. When you put the skewer in, put some wood glue on the end to make sure it stays! The cats already had big holes in them, so I stuck a straw with a glue dot on the end in them. I figure the cats will be placed on the cake, so it's not crucial they have something to keep them upright since they're so small anyways.
After that was done, I used white craft glue to attach the cats round heads to their bodies and my stolen hair bun to my bride. When that dried, I started sketching out my bride, groom and cats in pencil on my wooden forms.
I had a cardboard box that I stuck the skewers through to keep them upright and help with drying. It was perfect. And now, paint! I used acrylic craft paints that were on sale 2/$1.50 at Michaels. they dried quickly and were really easy to work with.
Now comes the part where you learn from my mistakes. I didn't have black paint. Cleverly I thought, that's okay, I have a black paint pen with an extra fine tip, that'll work perfectly! And it did. At first. I outlined all of Dan's clothes, put his cute little face on him. Then I did my face. The paint got a bit stuck, so I shook up the pen and tested it on another page and it was fine. I put one eye on my bride, and then.....
ACK!!!!! My paint pen exploded!!!! Don't ever ever use a paint pen for something like this!!! I liked the look of my little people with the wood instead of the skin tone paint, but ummm this is not okay! So I sanded down my mini-bride's face (poor girl) and did a quick run to Michaels to pick up black paint as well as flesh toned paint. Thankfully the flesh toned paint covered over what remained of the black paint and I was able to salvage my cake topper.
Look ma! No more black eye! So now I moved on to the cats. They were pretty straight forward and mostly involved brown paint and dry brushing. It's hard to paint a tabby, they have so many stripes! For our black cat, Peter, I mixed silver and black to give him a bit of a shimmer so he wouldn't look like this big black scary thing on our cake.
Here's our whole cake topper family, I think they turned out pretty cute! The whole thing took me an afternoon, but it would have been an hour shorter if my paint pen hadn't exploded!
No comments:
Post a Comment