I tried my hand at a new project this month. Our martial arts school has a group of very enthusiastic parents who support their athletes loudly and with gusto. Our AMYS Team Dad™, Todd, decided we needed a drum to bring to tournaments. He procured at 50 gallon steel drum and converted it to a much noisier drum. I volunteered to paint our school’s logo onto it.
Thankfully, our school logo is pretty simple.
I have zero experience painting with spray paint, but I at least wanted to attempt it. Some Googling let me to ordering a few cans of Montana Gold paint.
My amazing husband taped off the top of the drum and then cleaned, sanded, and primed the whole thing for me. Thank you, babe!
I have MAD respect for artists who can wield a can of spray paint like a paintbrush. I relied heavily on handmade stencils, Posca markers, masking tape, and even a paintbrush and acrylic paint for parts.
I am pretty sure I overthought this project more than was really necessary, but in the end, I’m happy with how it turned out. I realized just now that I didn’t take a photo of the drum after I sprayed on an acrylic clear coat and removed the tape at the top. I’ll try to get a photo of it at some point.
One thing I realized… we should’ve just removed the drum part at the top rather than tape it off. You can clearly see a change in texture and brightness where the tape was. Oh well. We can still go back and do that at some point.
I didn’t want the other side of the drum to feel left out, so I reached out to a friend who has a vinyl cutter to make a couple of decals for me. I quickly whipped up two designs in Illustrator and she was happy to get them going. FYI, a “kihap” is the Korean word for the “ay-ya!” that martial artists use in training and sparring.
I tried my best to make a reel that kinda shows my process on this project on Instagram. You can watch it HERE. I really should’ve just mounted my phone behind my shoulder for some parts of this.
Here’s a list of materials I used (yep, many affiliate links):
Montana Gold Spray Paint (I ordered this paint from Blick Art Supplies, it had a better price than Amazon)
Overall it was a really fun project. Of course, the fact that our studio won the honor of the Top School in Utah for the 14th year was just icing.