Hand Painted Door Knobs

When we renovated our flat a couple of years ago, we decided to keep the original doors throughout. We stripped them out to bare wood and repainted them white. Then we went shopping for some coloured door knobs, but we couldn’t find anything we liked. Mostly the ones we fancied were designed for cabinets, and not really suited for our doors. I did some searches online and came across some beautifully hand painted knobs by Sweet Mix Creation on Etsy. I really fell in love with all the colours and the simple designs. And I thought, why not, I can do this and so I did. We found some basic (meaning cheap!) white ceramic knob handles in our local diy store, they had to be slightly modified to fit our doors and that’s where my dad came in handy…he did a marvelous job!  
These are all the materials I used:
  • White ceramic knob handles, like these ones;
  • Ceramic Paint – I used the Marabu Ceramica Porcelain and Ceramic Paint in 15ml pots;
  • Round Nylon Brush – I used the Pro Arte Polar Brush no 4.
I did quite a number of sketches before choosing the design I wanted to go for, and this was fun too. I just used some felt tip coloured pens on sketching paper.
Once I made up my mind, I tranferred the design on the knob surface using an HB pencil. This was a bit tricky because the surface was curved and my hand had nothing to rest on.
Then the fun part begun. I used the paint stright from the pot, and literally dropped it onto the surface to make dots. If you attempting this, just a little bit of advice…don’t use too much paint otherwise the drop will start dripping on the side of the knob as the surface is not flat and you’ll end up with a paint drop rather than a dot…I know this from experience!

Then I let it dry for about 24 hours. Because I didn’t need the knobs to be waterproof, I didn’t oven-bake them.They have been serving us brilliantly so far and been added a subtle colour touch to our doors.

These are the ones I made for our living room to match the orange theme of the room. And the blue/turquoise ones are for our bathroom door. There are still two sets to do, a purple one for our bedroom and a green one for our kitchen. They are on my to-do list!