Painting and crafting with large clam shells is a lot of fun! All of the designs I’m featuring today can be made by any beginner. You need some acrylic craft paint, painting supplies, sealer, large clam shells and a few other supplies. They can be used to decorate inside your home for the summer season or place them outside in your flower garden to add a nice pop of color. I like to use them as decorating accents on my front porch, back deck and around our pool area.
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You’ll need large 4″ to 5″ wide clam shells collected from the beach. Wash them in Dawn Liquid Dish Soap. Dawn is great for removing sand, debris and fishy odors. Rinse with clean water and air dry for 2 days before painting on them.
All of the sea animals that you see are made out of paper. They’re NOT stickers! Stickers don’t work well on seashells for the long-term. These are paper cut-outs that I found in the scrapbooking aisle at my local craft store. There’s no adhesive on the back which makes them perfect for decoupaging onto seashells. Here’s some cute Sea Animal Die Cuts I found over on Amazon.
Base coat your seashells in the desired colors. On some I used one color and on others I’ve used a mixture of colors to come up with the background. I used Acrylic Craft Paint for all of the backgrounds. Let dry for 1-2 hours or until the paint is no longer tacky.
The paper sea animals were all pre-cut. I simply took them out of the pack. Gotta love easy!
Use a foam brush to apply a generous coat of Clear Mod Podge Sealer across each shell covering it completely. Place the paper cut-out on top…using your fingers or brush to push it firmly down into the wet Mod Podge. Keep pressing to smooth it out and to remove air bubbles. Once it’s laying flat…brush another generous layer of Clear Mod Podge over-the-top. Cover the entire shell. This will protect the image and all paint.
If you look closely you can see that I jazzed a few of them up by adding micro-fine glitter which gives them a nice sparkle. You want to sprinkle the micro-fine glitter on while the shell is still wet from the Mod Podge and then let them dry for several hours. That’s it, done!!!
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These are so pretty and look so bright and cheery. I would love to make some of these for our bathroom.