As fabulous as the rainbow-painted VW beetle project was, we decided painting an entire vehicle was a little excessive, even for us. Plus I was pretty confident that painting a car with regular acrylic paint was a recipe for disaster, so I decided keeping to a small disaster was the way to go.

And look, not a disaster at all! And this even though I followed the original, uncorrected instructions, which included no preparation of the surface and called for just any old acrylic paint. (There is a later corrected printing which provides more detail on the paint and surface preparation, but I didn’t have it when I completed the project.) Yes, the paint has developed kind of a weird crackly texture, but it’s stayed on for several months now and doesn’t look half-bad.

Car Stencils, based on The Family Creative Workshop, Volume 1: Acrylics, The Beetle Project

Of course, it doesn’t exactly look professional, so I wouldn’t try this on decent-looking vehicle. (Fortunately, I had access to a beat-up pickup truck—thanks, Leigh!) I also would highly recommend using an indoor/outdoor spray acrylic enamel instead of the random acrylics we used.

Materials

• Acrylic enamel paint
• Foam spouncers
• Silhouette vinyl
• Truck Stencils (PDF download)
• Truck Stencils (AI download)
• Truck Stencils (Silhouette download)

The good thing about doing a half-assed painting job is that the only tricky part of this project is getting the stencil cut. I cut mine out of vinyl on my Silhouette, but you could use pre-cut vinyl stencils or even hand cut the vinyl with an X-Acto. See the materials list above to download my templates (for personal use only, please).

Next step is to clean and dry the surface. I just used some 409 cleaner and a lot of paper towels. When the paper towels stopped coming away black, I figured that was clean. Then press the vinyl onto the surface, making sure to smooth out any bubbles.

If you were doing a spray paint, you’d also want to tape off around the stencil. Since I was using plain old acrylics, I just used foam spouncers to dab the paint on. This helps prevent paint from leaking underneath the stencil. My five-year-old helped me out with the first coat, then I dabbed on another layer to get even coverage.

Then just carefully peel the stencil pack and reveal the nice, clean, lovely edges.

Then let dry, and that’s it! (The revised instructions suggest applying a clear acrylic sealer, which is a good idea that I definitely did not do.)

For my maker stencils, I did a “make” logo, the hammer and wrench, and a drill icon. I actually like that the slightly rough finish goes with the maker theme.

Painting is intense work!

And our crafty pickup truck looks awesome!

Check out the vintage inspiration for this project here: The Family Creative Workshop, Volume 1: Acrylics, The Beetle Project (1974)