Urn Plain to Shabby Chic

As you may recall I picked this urn up at an Estate sale before Christmas.

It was pretty beat up, rusty and not that great looking,  but I liked the shape, so I gave it a make over this morning.

 I decided to go with a blue and white chippy look,

Front

With touches of worn gold.  I painted the urn with an aqua blue chalk paint, let that dry and came back with a few touches of off white chalk paint, leaving some of the original color showing in the deep crevices of the base and around the relief parts.

Back

For the design I used Mod Podge and glued on a print from a patterned napkin after the Paint was dry, separating the layers and only using the top layer of the napkin. 

 Below is the detail of the decoupaged design on the front of the urn.

And here is the detail of the back.  I cut off the border of the napkin for the blue band around the back side and decoupaged that to the urn, also.  When everything was dry I went back took off the paint in places to give it some chipped and worn areas.

Since this urn is a metal I used a craft knife instead of sand paper to chip away at the paint.

This is a close up view of one of the handles.  Here you can see the distressing and chipped paint along with the bits of worn gold.  

I used a gold leafing pen to add the bits of gold color here and there. And then went back when that was dry and lightly went over parts of the gold with a dry paint technique using the white paint to age the gold a bit.  I didn't want it to look too shiny and new.

Happy Crafting!