Painting the shark

When I retire, I want to be a rubbish rescue artist. At least, that's what I told my husband a week or so ago. I walk down the city streets or run through the suburban neighborhoods on trash days, and I see too, too much interesting stuff at the curb headed unnecessarily for the landfills. It's not just that people are throwing perfectly good, useful and serviceable objects "away", although they do that, too; it's that so much of the broken (?) stuff that people put out seems to be things that I think deserve be reincarnated in fabulous ways. The dining room table with one broken leg that was exactly -- I mean exactly – the amount of lumber that I needed for a set of bookshelves in my command center: that is just one such example.

Maybe I won't actually become a rubbish rescue artist, but the act of declaring that particular aspiration out loud has made me a little bit bolder about snagging things from the side of the road (and frankly, I was fairly bold before this). That is probably why, this past Monday, I was painting a shark at 3:14.

Great white terror of the deep?

This is a shark that had toiled away much of its life decorating somebody's aquarium, and was now sitting curbside. The shark is missing a lower jaw, and much of the paint had dissolved away. It just so happens that I've been thinking ahead to our annual Pirate Dinner, and I figured a shark would be an excellent decoration near the cake, so I rescued the lower-jaw-less shark, ran it through the dishwasher, and decided to paint it again.

Because this particular shark has retired from its aquarium job and has decided never to go back to work in the tank ever again, I'm not particularly worried about underwater durability of the paint.  So at first, I used some blue paint left over from a furniture project, since that seems to match the shark's original color. But after I put on the first coat, I realized that I think of sharks as "gray", so I nabbed an adorable, tiny little jam jar, and combined some left-over gray paint with a bit of blue paint to mix up my very own batch of shark paint.

My teensy jar of shark paint.  

I think it came out really well!   A bit of black permanent marker for the eyes, and the shark looks sleek and menacing.

Also, if it's on a table so that you're looking down toward this ferocious creature, it's not so obvious that the shark is missing a jaw.  

That makes this particular shark much safer from the point of view of the pirates, I guess!