the purses

A few months ago, I bought these cute purses through a wholesale website. When I first started selling on Etsy, I actually started with painting jackets and purses with different character art. My first sale was a green Loki jacket. But when I started painting wood letters, I left that behind and thought it was time to start again. Of course my first thought for these bags was Disney characters! I actually picked out characters for all six of the purses, but I painted two of them back in February and I got tired of waiting to release the video.

For the first purse, I really wanted something black and white. I had already decided that one of these bags would have Mickey Mouse, and with the black and white idea in my head, I started looking at steamboat willie pictures. But first, I wanted my bag to have a black border. I painted the edges past the stitching, making sure to get every side.

Normally when I paint on leather, I paint my sketch in white leather paint because it’s the easiest color to cover up, but I couldn’t exactly do that with a white purse. So I grabbed a pencil instead and got to work drawing. Unfortunately I couldn’t record this because the light made it hard to see my pencil lines and I had to get really close to paint it. With my sketch complete, it was time to paint!

Luckily I had all the colors so mixing paint wasn’t necessary. The colors I used were “Light Grey”, Dark Grey, and Black. With leather paint, it’s best to work in thin coats and to let them dry really well before painting the next coat. If you paint another coat too soon, sometimes it lifts the paint on the layer before and makes things really patchy. 

For the blue purse, I thought it was just grey enough where I could paint Stitch. Lilo and Stitch was one of my favorite Disney movies as a kid, and I had the perfect picture for the bag. For this purse, I used Pale Blue, Light Blue, Hot Pink. For his ears, I did have to mix paint. I mixed together hot pink and lilac to get the perfect shade.

I then used burgundy for the inside of his mouth, white for the eyes of course, and Navy blue for the nose. For stitch’s teeth, I needed a yellowed white, so I mixed white, pale yellow, and some light grey. Finally it was time for the line art. I grabbed my fine point paintbrush and used my black paint to finish my painting.

I could have stopped here, but I couldn’t get this hawaiian flower pattern out of my head. Using the cricut design space, I uploaded a floral pattern and made this stencil, making sure I had a circle opening at the center for the magnetic clasp. I cut the stencil on stencil vinyl and weeded out the pattern then used masking tape to transfer the stencil to the bag. Whenever I use stencil vinyl to paint, I never use a paint brush.

After I finished the purses, it was bothering me how noticeable the purse metal text was even covered in paint. I bought a paintable filler on the Angelus website and used my bone folder to fill in those spaces and try to get it as smooth as I could. All that was left was to repaint the covered section and the purses were finished!!