Dollar Store Art!

If you’ve been spying on my Instagram photos, you know I enjoy taking art from the dollar store and then making it more artful.

The first step is finding great dollar store art. While writing up this list of 100 Best Dollar Store Items for Maxim, I learned that the dollar store had more to offer than just scary meats and pregnancy tests. They also sold statues!

Not every dollar store us created (or stocked) equally. My girlfriend and I drove about 40 miles and visited about five or six dollar stores to find just the right stuff. I like the animal busts. These nicknacks are wonderfully weird even if you don’t modify them with colors. Well worth a buck each.

The best of the bunch are the rhino statues. Sadly, to those who live in eastern Pennsylvania, I may have purchased every available rhino bust in the area. The upside, I totally screwed up Dollar Tree’s inventory which means the following phone call may happen.

DOLLAR TREE WHOLESALE BUYER: Dammit! We need more rhino busts!
MANUFACTURER: Really?
BUYER: Yes! Hurry!
MANUFACTURER: Okay! Sending out 3,000 units to each store!
BUYER: Huzzah!

So to all the rhino statue enthusiasts looking for a good deal, you can thank me later.

I also got two cherub statues and some flamingos and parrots. (The flamingos and parrots didn’t turn out that great, but I learned a lot in the process.)

And this dog.

Here are some more before pics:

Yeah, that’s an elephant.

And now using the magic of spray paint, I’ll transform these items into art…

I used black, gold and hot pink spray paint. Using pink as the base color worked the best. The pink was also the hardest to use as the paint was thin and watery and didn’t want to stick.

It was fun seeing how the different colors worked and fought with each other. Gold makes everything look better.

Then I went back and kept adding layers to bring out the detail. Here’s the elephant before I gave him a final finishing coat of pink.

Love the way the giraffe turned out. Might be hard to tell from these pics, but the hot pink really blasts through the gold giving it the look of an alien. Love it.

I was never happy with the dog…until I used some cardboard to give him tiger stripes and speckled him with black.

More final shots. I went half and half on two rhinos, making one half gold, the other black. Looks awesome. Love the drips. These look wet but are really dry thanks to the magic of glossy paint.

The other gold/black rhino.

Another rhino. This is my favorite of the rhinos. He looks so old, weathered, and great.

The lion heads (I did two of them) came out well.

Here’s a before and after. Take my word on it: The pink pops much brighter in person.

The other lion’s head.

Mixing the gold and pink, gave the elephant a bronze color. It looks like an antique…slightly.

And the little cherub looks fantastic with the pink base and gold coat.

The giraffe!!!

So what will I do with an army of multicolored trophies?

Not sure. Might sell them for $2, making a sick 100% profit (not counting paint). Or I might hand them out to people who accomplish something worthy of such an award.