Spray Paint Galaxy Notebooks


Ever have one of those, "Hey I wonder if I could..." moments when thinking up craft projects? Well, today I totally thought...hey, I wonder if I could spray paint those composition notebooks that have plastic covers. I had a small stack of them hanging out in my office, just sitting there....looking all lonely and sad, so I decided to jazz them up.


I picked a couple boring blue ones. One appears to be Mead brand...the other one is probably Target brand. I slipped a gallon zip top bag over the paper in the notebooks to avoid the edges getting completely spray painted. I folded the excess bag under the notebook and put them in a cardboard box and took them outside.


Then I grabbed some old spray paint. You'll absolutely need a black and probably a silver--everything else just depends on what you have in your stash. I had a medium blue and a bright purple and a teal and some white. I used a bit of all of those colors. They were all old, mostly Krylon, but the silver is Rustoleum. I started out by spraying the covers black and blue. The white printed labels need some extra covering (as did the white binding), so I let my first coat dry and came back for a second coat.


It was a beautiful warm breezy spring day, so the paint dried quickly and I was able to come back and start spraying swaths of other colors over my black and blue. I tried to keep it just a bit streaky so it didn't all blend together and just kept adding colors until I liked it. I even layered on a little more black after the colors so we didn't completely lose the black.



After I was satisfied with the covers, I took the notebooks out of the box to dry a bit more before flipping them over to do the back side.


After they had a good hour or so to dry, I put them back in the box and folded the zip top bags underneath. I started out with the black and a little blue spray paint again.


The back side went a bit faster since I knew what I was doing. I sprayed on the colors in streaks and layered until I liked the way it looked.


It's hard to really see the depth of color and how shimmery they turned out from the silver paint and the tiny little splatters of paint. They turned out really cool. So yes, you can spray paint composition notebooks that have plastic covers. The binding on the store brand notebook pulled away from the cover just a bit, but I think it will flatten as everything cures. I'm not sure how well these will hold up, so I might paint a thin layer of mod podge over the covers to keep them sealed so the paint doesn't scratch. I'll post an update if I decide to do that.


All in all, this experiment turned out really well, and I can't wait to try out the galaxy spray paint treatment again!

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