Painting Plastic Pots to Look Like Ceramic

While I love IKEA for raw supplies, while I don’t love the maze-like layout and the shopping carts that make the think I am going to throw a knee out every time I turn the corner, I do find great things to make projects out of at at a reasonable price. At the very end of my last trip, I picked up some three dollar planters at IKEA in their plants section, and decided to give them a little bit of a glow up by Painting Plastic Pots to Look Like Ceramic pots with multi-purpose paint, black sand and wood putty.

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For this project, you’ll need: Find supplies here. Plastic pots, multi-surface paint, Plastic-wood wood putty, black sand, and a pallet knife. You can watch a video of the process or skip below for the step by step.

Start by painting the surface with multi-surface paint. This will help everything stick. I used a black and a tan multi-surface paint.  For the first pot I painted the top with black multi surface paint, the bottom of tan, and then spread wood putty with a palette knife. After the wood putty was applied,  a little water on the palette knife works well to smooth it out. Sprinkle black sand on your faux painted plastic pot to get a textured, gritty look. In a few ares I thought the sand looked a little too heavy, and I just went back over those with a little tan paint.

For the second pot, I painted black and tan paint again as a base, but then I added a little bit of water to the wood putty before painting to make it a little bit looser in consistency. Using a very CRUDDY brush, brush it onto the plastic pot. And the rougher the brush the better because it gives you great texture!

At the end, I used to stippling/ pouncing technique to create a textured look that almost resembles old stucco. I let it dry, then added a few coats of multi-surface paint just to seal it. Once it was dry it was ready to plant! What I really love about this is that they’re plastic so they’re lightweight know they look like I am ceramic, and if I needed to I could actually drill holes in the bottom for drainage.

I planted mine with some cute plants. They actually sit on top of my refrigerator so I don’t have to pull them down a ton to water them.

If you liked this post on how to paint plastic pots look like high end ceramic planters, make sure to check out how to make stamped numbered glass jars.