Scavenger Chic

Pottery Barn Copycat, Horse Zoetrope

• By Joan
• April 3, 2019
• 7 Comments

I have a fun project for you today. A copycat Pottery Barn Horse Zoetrope on wood. Right now I have no idea where I’m actually going to put it but I wanted to make it because I could and it didn’t hurt that I had all my supplies on hand.

This is my Pottery Barn inspiration piece and right now it’s on sale, so if you don’t want to try your hand at doing a copycat here’s your chance to own it.

I get a weird satisfaction seeing if I can replicate items I find at Pottery Barn.  Is that just me?

Now to find my horse zoetrope .  There is no shortage of galloping, trotting, walking horse images online.

I  eventually found my perfect Pottery Barn horse  at an article entitled, The Gait Debate.  The debate was  whether all four of a horses hooves leave the ground at once and the photographer, Muybridge, was the first to capture a horse, Sallie Gardner, with a dozen high speed electronic shutters, and there she is (image 3) with all four of her legs up at once. Who knew?

The photographs were later assembled  on  a zoetrope .  Spinning the zoetrope allowed the horse images to come to life becoming some of the first examples of moving pictures.  The images from the  zoetrope would be viewed thru slits in a drum.

Since I’m seeing how close I can copycat the Pottery Barn zoetrope images, I first had to invert the colors in my photo editing software to make the white background black and the horse white.

To print out my picture, I’m once again using Microsoft Publisher this time setting up my blank page size 0f 58″ x 6″.  My inspiration Pottery Barn piece was 59″ x 6.25″, this will give me a border of 1/2″ on both sides and 1/8″ on top and bottom.

I cropped each cell of the horse picture individually to get rid of the border between the images then reattached them in Publisher.  This printed out on 6 sheets of paper.

Note:  Make it easier on yourself…since the 6 images printed out on 6 sheets of paper you could just print the images out individually without lining them up first.

Like my tulip seed catalog from last week, I’m once again printing on tissue paper.

Cut a piece of tissue paper a couple inches wider and a couple inches longer than a standard piece of copy paper. Iron as many wrinkles out of the tissue as you can. Wrap a piece of copy paper with your tissue, taping in place. If your tissue paper has a shinier side and a flat side, make sure you print on the flat side, it will hold the ink better. It’s ready to use in your printer.

Prepare your wood for painting. Since, my Pottery Barn inspiration piece was 6.25″x 59″ x 2″, that’s what mine is!  A cut down scrap piece of 2×8.  Actually the thickness is closer to 1 1/2″ thick.

Paint the top white.  I’m using some of my leftover house trim paint.

The edges are painted with black chalk paint with a little mess onto the top.  That’s actually on purpose.  

Glob even more paint on the end of a block of wood (inset) and drag it along the center of the front of the board.  Hang with me, this will make more sense in just a second.

Print out the Sallie Gardner pictures and trim the edges.  You may need to iron the tissue paper once more.

Use spray adhesive to attach the zoetrope pictures to your board.

Notice the paint on the horse?  That’s the black paint that was painted with the wood block shining through.  The tissue paper mutes the paint just a bit.

Use a sander to rough up the edges of the tissue paper.

Seal the tissue paper with a spray  clear matte finish.

I finished the painted black edge with a vintage wax.  Paint on and rub off the excess.  

If a horse image is not your thing there are tons of other Zoetrope images online.  Think circus, clowns, monkeys,  dancers, runners…you name it.

Stay inspired.

Shared at Talk of the Town

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