Extreme Sparkle--great metallic paints!

 

I love glitter!  

I am a decorative painter as well as an artist. I paint a lot of Christmas ornaments, which means I get to indulge my taste in it.  Plus,  I live in Louisiana, where Mardi Gras is a season, not just a day, so I can glomp on the glitter then too. 

But finding a decent paint to do that with has been challenging over the years.

I remember the big boom of decorative painting in the late seventies, when new products hit the market all the time.  For those of us wanting shiny stuff, the results were often disappointing.  Some of those beautiful metallic colors took seven or eight coats to show up, and wound up looking like yucky lines of thick  metallic glue all over your work.  And remember the awful glitter paints that started shedding glitter before they were even dry?  Ugh! Not to mention the huge number of paints that tarnished and turned colors in the bottle fairly quickly.

But I never quit buying paints.  This time I kept doing the same thing over and over and finally got different results.

DecoArt's line of Extreme Sheen acrylics is the bomb, folks!  They offer sixteen different colors so you can get just the right shade for any project. It gives great color coverage in small areas and accents with just one coat, allowing for delicate stroke work and really elegant results. For big areas, I would recommend two coats or an undercoat of an appropriate base color, but wow, what results!  You can vary the texture by using different strokes to apply the paint and get totally different finishes. It is really super for adding a touch of glitter and glam without dragging in that touch of tacky with it! I have also found it handy for touching up dinged frames that I thought were lost causes (which by itself has saved me a bundle).

I have stopped at least two dozen people in local craft stores from buying a cheaper metallic paint and recommended this one, because I know it is a top quality product.  Just don't mix it with any kind of medium, as it messes up the sheen of it.  The company website says you can thin it with water.  I keep running out before it gets thick!

This product is not hard to find.  Most local craft stores and online art suppliers carry it. 

Y'all check it out!

In the meanwhile, my professional site is betsylevels.com, and I have some of my decorative painting pieces as well as paintings available there.  Hope you will visit and join my preferred customer list to hear about my latest exhibits and sales! And check out some of my merchandise with reproductions of my original artwork on a wide variety of surfaces and items: