Glittery Animal Ornaments

Somewhere online I found glittery animal ornaments and knew I had to make them.   I carefully chose my animals from all over the place. Sea creatures, bugs, and more sea creatures.  The African animals, farm animals and large dinosaurs came from the Dollar Tree.  Those that were 3 - 4 inches tall worked best.  Aaron helped me put hooks in them by finding the balancing point and drilling a hole if the animal was made of hard plastic.  I will say this turned out to be much more costly and time consuming that I anticipated, but isn't that the way with craft projects that look simple?

Then I sorted the animals based on what color I wanted them to be.

Priming them worked best (as opposed to just painting), although the metal primer shown here did not work for this, it never fully dried.

Generally I would paint the undersides first.

This was definitely a toxic project and doing it in our basement was probably not the best idea.  Especially ten feet from our furnace, but there were no flash fires luckily.

I used Krylon Glitter Blast which can be found at Fred Meyer (in select colors), Walmart and I also saw it at Craft Warehouse in red and green, but it was super expensive there.  This paint did give me the effect that I wanted, but at a price.  I had read online that this paint did not work well and I had a similar experience.  The nozzle would clog with the glitter, one time immediately.  Meaning that I went to spray paint with a brand new can and once it was on, it was on and wouldn't turn off.  So I always had all my animals laid out ready to go for that color in case the can exploded glitter uncontrollably.  I also kept a plastic shopping bag in my hand to stuff the can in.  Sometimes working the nozzle in and out would solve the problem, sometimes this just caused a geyser of paint to erupt out of the top of the can.  Other times it would work fine the first time, but continue to leak all of the propellant out so nothing would come out the next time I went to use it, even though it was half full.  At $6 a can (although I did find some colors on sale for $3.84 at Fred Meyer, and up to $11 a can at Craft Warehouse - what?!) this got spendy.

After getting as even a coat of glitter as I could, I added a Glitter Blast Clear Coat.