Painting Tips for Your Honey Money Bank

The Honey Money Bank is a unique and practical craft project, suitable for anyone with basic woodworking skills and tools. If you’re a beekeeper, it also makes a great value-added gift package for small jars of honey.

This is a Stonehaven original design that you won’t find anywhere else — but now you can build your own! Click here for more information.

Decorate Your Beehive Bank

Here’s how we used a few simple painting techniques to make a realistic miniature “beehive” of the coin bank. First, the entire bank was given a coat of primer, and then a coat of ordinary white craft paint. We painted both the inside and the outside of the cover, but left the interior of the bank unpainted — who’s going to see it? And in any case, the inside of the bank would just get scratched up with coins if it was painted.

As noted in the Honey Money Bank construction plans, the handles for the “supers” of the hive bank are painted on, using a stencil — a stencilling template is included in the plans — and a very pale grey colour of craft paint.

On the Honey Money Bank we’re showing here, Rebecca added some decorative painted “grass” around the bottom with a very fine craft brush and ordinary craft paints in three shades of green.

The tiny painted “flower” in the grass are simply dots of yellow craft paint, put on with the end of a toothpick.

Three shades of grey, stroked on with a broad flat brush, give some texture to the removable cover of the beehive bank. Finally, the words “Honey Money” were added in freehand style. We used press-on lettering for another money bank, but in the end we preferred the “country look” of painting the words on by hand.

The fun is yours, to decorate your own bank as you like!