A few years ago My folks were getting rid of an old beat up bench that they had, so I decided I could take it and have a few more years use out of it.

Well, after a year, the middle board rotted and I thought it had outlived its usefulness. But, being who I am, I figured I would give it one more chance! So I asked my Pop if he could fix the board and he, being who he is, said sure and went a step further to fix a wobble on the leg (Thanks, Pops!)   

You can see the result below:

After quite a bit of sanding, I dug out some old exterior white paint I had from repainting an outside window frame and slapped on a few coats of that.  I figured I was done at this point and would just urethane it.

But, white seemed kind of boring… a little too simple.  I posted it on social media and many agreed that it needed some zaz!

I knew I wanted to go hippy with it, but thought instead of painting on just a white background, why not go crazy and spray paint it first?

In retrospect, I don’t think it was really necessary, but it did add some depth to some of the designs I did over it.

I originally wanted to sketch out kind of how I wanted it, but then decided to just freehand it as I went along.  I loved the process of just organically painting what came to mind and then, if I didn’t like something, working to make it better.  Having said that, though, if I do another similar undertaking, I probably will sketch it first if just to have another version of the piece that I can use elsewhere.

It took days and days to do this scene in acrylic since a lot of the acrylic had to be gone over more than once due to opacity issues and then there was the tedious outlining that was very popular in psychedelic art (check out my Pinterest Board with some of that artwork here).

In the slides below (click an image to flip through) you can see the final result. 

Now, I didn’t take photos before I put the spar-urethane on it though which leads me to the one real regret I have about this project and a rather painful lesson learned…. *sobs*

I like to use up stuff that I have on hand before buying new, so I decided to use the spar urethane I had left over from sealing a swing I stained and sealed last year. Well, evidently a lot of the stain made it into the urethane, giving it a brown cast.  This tint really dulled the colors so although I did a good three coats on the bench top (two underneath) and know it is protected, the vibrancy dimmed quite a bit.  That was disappointing, but lesson learned!  Next time don’t cheap out and get a new can for a new project!

Note: Please forgive the shine on some of these pictures.  That urethane really is shiny…