I Transformed a Rock into a Paddle-board (sort of)

Sometimes you find something that so resembles something else that it must be then remade to look like that thing. Confused yet? This summer on a relaxing float down the river with my family, my dad found an oblong flatish rock that looked like, you may have guessed it, a paddle-board. Naturally, I had no choice but to paint it and then make the transformation complete.

For some reason I thought it unnecessary to take a picture of what this rock looked like before I started painting it, so for that part you'll just have use your imagination.

I sketched the initial design out with pencil which I would thence essentially "color in" with paint (a most professional technique I’m sure).

I put the first coat on in my most professional painting ability (note those ultra straight lines). I realized at this point that I probably should have done the whole thing in white and then painted over it to keep the blue bright. As it was too late for that, it seemed only right to plow on full speed ahead (also I didn't want to have to redraw the little line thing).

I'm super impatient when it comes to waiting for paint coats to dry and I kinda just slapped them on as soon as the first layer was mostly dry (also, I have no idea why the foam brush is in this picture because I didn't use it for anything).

Three(ish) coats later, and I left it to finish off drying out the rest of the way.

If you can get to this point in a painting project and your hands do not looks something like this, props to you, maybe I’m just a mess. Actually, most painters’ hands looks like this, or more so, so I’d say I’m on the right track (minus the smiley face, of course. I drew that on with one of my pens that broke).

Let us also at this time take a quick moment to acknowledge my painter’s palette. It’s literally just a scrap of brown paper bag on top of a notebook. Oh, and I mixed my paint with the head of a pin. Ingenuity is everything.

My original intention was to leave the rock just like that. Super simple, super plain, but you get the idea. It just didn't have the "WOW" factor I was hoping for. So, I traced out an animated tombstone-like shape (you know who something out of a Tim Burton movie would look) on another scrap of brown paper and drenched it in grey paint (black and white paint mixed with the aforementioned pin).

That served to give the rock some dimension as that part on a paddle board is generally foam (I did try to find some foam around my room but with no such luck). I glued the paper on with a regular glue stick and at last thought that I was done.

But it still wasn’t as cool as I wanted it to be. So I was forced to add more details

I used some thick black thread and some hot glue to make the criss-crossy elastic thing that most paddleboards have on them. I cut a small rectangular strip of paper and painted that grey with white squiggles on it (for writing but I couldn't write nearly that small and precisely with a paintbrush. That I glued on with hot glue in an attempt to make it pop up more like the handle actually would. As a last touch I added a small ring of orange at the back around the valve and an interpretative shape at the tip as a logo.

All-in-all, not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Not pictured: I covered the whole thing in Mod Podge just to keep the string from getting pulled off, or the handle falling off, and to make it look shiny and polished.