Hand Painted Stone Cactus Plants

My mom always tries to grow cactuses but they always die because she waters them too much or not enough or both so I had an idea. I saw some pictures of rock cactuses but I didn’t know how to make them. But I wanted to try.

My mom really likes them and she thinks I can sell them!

This is how I made them…

You’re gonna need

rocks, little plant pots, sand, primer, paint, epoxy glue, and maybe white-out

The tools I used were

scrub brush, paint brushes, mixing tray, sandpaper, and paper to keep the table clean

First you should choose rocks. I think nice round rocks you can find in a river are the best because they look like cactus. But you could make chunky pointy cactuses if you want to.

I looked at pictures of cactuses online and picked flat rocks for some kids and rounder ones for other types . I wanted them to look realistic.

We also had a lot of plant pots laying around. Mostly they had dead cactuses in them so I chose the ones I liked and emptied them out.

The next thing I did was wash the rocks I had and the planter pots, because everything was DIRTY! I didn’t get rocks out of a river. We had some at home so I used them.

I just turned on a hose and used a brush and scrubbed them real hard. And they looked good!

I found out the hard way that it you paint on rocks, the paint can just come off with a scratch or whatever. So that was bad. So my dad told me to use primer.

Primer is like paint, but its real sticky so you can paint the rocks with it and then your paint is gonna stick better.

I used a primer my dad had which was for concrete and it worked great

The primer takes a few hours to dry so I just left it all night.

The primer made the rocks look nice and shiny and I almost didn’t want to paint over it!

So now its time to put the rocks in the planter pot and see how they look. You can choose which one to put where and what colours they’re gonna be.

I put sand in the bottom of the pots and then set the rocks into it and I just moved them around until I was happy. idk maybe you want to do only one big one in one pot, or lots of smaller ones, up to you!

After I set them up I thought they looked too much like just rocks.

So I decided to add a second level on some of them. This can look like flowers or new cactus buds like lots of cactuses have.

You can skip this if you don’t want to add buds or flowers like this.

I wanted to stick small rocks to bigger rocks so I tried superglue first.

But they just snapped off if you even looked at them!

Online people said to use epoxy glue and I didn’t know what that was but my dad and I got some and it was actually easy. But seriously STINKY!!!

OK so epoxy glue has two parts and you have to mix them to make the glue.

I just used some card paper and a chopstick to mix. You put a drop of A and a drop of B and then mix them altogether.

It dries FAST like 3 mins so you gotta work fast or you’re cooked!

I used some bottle caps to get the small rocks up to the right level just look at the pictures.

And I used sandpaper before the glue to make the rocks a little rough. idk if you have to do this but it worked good for me.

After the epoxy is hard you can start painting so wait like an hour.

I have lots of acrylic paints which I pretty much never use because I like to draw better. This gave me a chance to use them though!

Basically I tried the greens I had but most of them needed a little more yellow. But you can decide your own colours.

The paint needs 2 coats but it dries fast.

What I did is paint one side of each one and then start the other side and they were basically dry already. You do you.

I also did some in two different colours to look like stripes or ridges.

After 2 coats they looked good. So next is decoration.

It depends what cactus types you chose how you want to decorate them.

I put just dots on some and lines on some and crosses to make it look like the cactus spikes.

I tried a white-out pen and that worked well for dots but not great for lines or spikes so I used a tiny paintbrush for those and white paint. I also tried using the back of the paintbrush for dots. I think this was easier than the whiteout but it depends what you have. A paint marker would also probably work real good.

You can skip this if you don’t want bright colours.

I wanted some flowers so I painted red and pink on some of the small rocks I expoxyed on. You can also use paper flowers or plastic ones I guess if they look good. I tried that too and I also liked it.

Everything was done so I put the pots together. This was based on my designs from the beginning but I changed them a bit.

I pushed the painted cactus rocks into the sand and then added some small rocks to help the cactus plants stand up and stay in their place.

My dad said I should add concrete in the bottom of the pot to fix them in and you can do that if you want, but I just covered it with small pebbles instead and I like the way that looks. Plus I can move them around later if I feel like it.

All done!

Now you can put them anywhere and even water them if you want. They won’t die, mom!

**********I hope you like my project. Please try it and post your pictures!**********