How to NOT paint a baseball bat

 Here's my mostly complete baseball bat for a punk version of Sailor Moon. It looks pretty good so far, but I made my fair share of mistakes, which I will now share with you so you won't make them,

 I bought a cheap baseball bat from a tourist shop. For some reason, it has an Arsenal logo on it. Has Arsenal branched out into baseball or rounders? Anyway, my first mistake was not sanding it. Sanding helps the paint to stick. The spray paint I used was really good, so it didn't matter too much. I think it was Montana brand paint, in a pale pink colour.I only needed a few coats to cover it. 

 My next mistake was using a different type of spray paint for the details. I bought a small bottle of spray paint, but it's a lot more watery, almost like acrylic paint. It was hard to paint over the other spray paint. The magenta paint was also very runny. 

 I made a stencil with tape, cutting out the letters with a scalpel. Unfortunately when I stuck the stencil on to the bat, the magenta paint bled under the tape. I had to respray some areas light pink, and chip off the magenta paint in others. Outlining the letters and rose with a permanent marker made it look a lot better. 

My last mistake was how I applied the varnish. For some reason, I couldn't get the spray varnish into thin coats, so there were thick layers of varnish. I also made the mistake of touch it when it was wet, and not removing the cord from the handle. The cord stuck to the handle and when I removed it, it pulled of some of the paint. Luckily I want this bat to look a bit rough, so it doesn't matter too much. 

Hopefully once I put white tape on the handle, it will pull the design together. So far it looks pretty good.