Pin Board Paintings: Display Your Collector’s Pins

Pin trading is one of our favorite activities at Walt Disney World! Since our last trip, our collection has steadily grown. With so many beautiful pins, it seems a waste to put them in a drawer till our next visit. We decided that pin board paintings were the perfect way to display our growing collection!

Finding Collectible Pins

You can find pins at Disney parks and resorts, in online groups, and on eBay, however, our favorite place to buy pins is in the clearance section of our local Disney Store.

A typical pin costs a few dollars, but clearance prices on large sets bring the cost per pin down. We have paid as little as $0.75 per pin! Because we’ll be trading them anyway, we buy several of the same set if it’s a good deal.

We are happy to buy outside the parks because it is great for our wallet. We also know the pins we’re buying are genuine.

Creating Pin Board Paintings

Pin board paintings can be as simple or complex as you’d like. We used framed canvases and acrylic paints to create our masterpieces.

Materials

acrylic paints
canvases
masking fluid (optional)
pencils
paintbrushes

Brainstorm a concept, sketch it on the canvases, and paint it!

For the artistically challenged, a stencil of Tinker Bell or Cinderella’s castle would work wonders. You can also paint a solid board, which really makes the pins pop!

Using Masking Fluid

Masking fluid is a type of liquid latex that prevents paint from covering one surface of a painting. Think of it like painter’s tape; it’s often used to prevent artists from accidentally covering areas that need to stay white.

We used it to place a Hidden Mickey in my son’s pin board painting.

He painted a Pollack without even noticing the masking fluid was there. He was trying so hard to cover the entire canvas!

After it dried, we peeled back the masking fluid and revealed the Hidden Mickey! (The peeling part is super satisfying.)

He was thrilled!

I used the same technique on the canvas we painted solid grey. My non-crafty husband isn’t really into pin trading, but our kids snag tie pins for him when they have a chance. (They think he loves them because he wears one to work every day.)

Our Finished Pin Board Paintings

My oldest daughter went dark, my middle child went rainbow, and I went Mary Blair.

The canvases easily stick to the wall with Command poster strips and can be removed if we are trading or adding new pins.

Ta-da! We’ve started adding pins already!

Do you collect pins? How do you store or display them?