painted peony purse

Peony season has arrived and that means I’ve been at our local Sunday market every weekend at 10am sharp picking out a bouquet.

It also means that I get extra inspired during this time of year because there is nothing quite as beautiful as a peony! And after finding a $12 simple white purse, I was totally inspired to transform it with a little paint and creativity.

The purse that I used was synthetic leather (not leather) and in my experience pretty much any “pleather” accessories can be transformed with good ol’ acrylic paint. I’ve transformed countless pleather purses and so far I haven’t experienced any issues with cracking or peeling because I seal them with gel medium or a light layer of polyurethane.

If this worries or concerns you, there are some really great leather/synthetic paints out there which are guaranteed to work well on that surface. My favorite is Angelus paint which is formulated to be used on leather/pleather.

I started by lightly sketching out my design with a water based marker and then I got busy painting!

This process is pretty straight forward! I used my peonies as inspiration and took my time painting them.

The surface on my bag has a lot of texture which I liked because it added a textural element to everything.

As many of you know, I LOVE to use a lot of line work and black outlines my work but for this project I challenged myself not to outline anything but instead but use darker and light shapes of paint for shadows and highlights.