How To Distress Wood With Paint
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Do you want to give a painted piece of furniture a well worn and aged look? Here is an easy technique for distressing a painted piece of furniture, door or just about anything. Are you interested in a distressed stained finish? Check out the two part series on Distressed wood finishing: How to make new look old (part 1).
The general technique is to paint the wood with a light color, preferably a slightly off white or light cream. Don’t use a high gloss paint. Use a low luster enamel paint.
A high gloss pure white paint will not look right. Why? Remember that as paint ages it darkens and yellows a bit and the paint loses some of its luster and shine. The intended purpose of this finishing technique is to make the piece look old.
The darker the base paint color is the harder it will be to make it look aged, so stick with a lighter color.
Supplies that you will need:
- Low luster enamel paint in an off white (egg shell) or light cream color.
- Stain - This can be either a water or oil based stain. Avoid the gel stains as they are too thick and tend not to work so well with this technique. Select a soft brown colored stain.
- 100% cotton rags. Old worn out socks, underwear, T-shirts work really well. The rags need to be 100% cotton as synthetic materials do not absorb the stain properly and could chemically react with the stain.
The steps:
- Distress the piece. Using a variety of tools hammer, chain, nails, knife, etc. The purpose here is to age the piece of furniture and make it look like it has been around for decades and has taken the wear and tear of daily use and abuse. Use the nails to make holes that look like worm holes in the wood. Use the knife to make small cuts and groves into the wood. A chain is handy to hit the surface to give it nice rounded dents and dimples. Have fun with this step, but don’t get too carried away, as the age related “damage” should look natural.
- Paint the piece with the light colored base paint with a paint brush. Keep the brush strokes in the same direction as the wood grain. Seeing brush strokes in the dried paint is very desirable, since back in the old days, everything that was painted was painted with a brush.
- Once the paint has dried take a rag, dip it into the stain and rub it lightly into the painted surface. The stain will soak into and collect in the distressed holes and dimples. The stain will also collect in the crevasses of the brush strokes. Rub extra stain into the areas where dirt and dust would naturally collect, around the edges, in the corners. If the piece has a raised panel design rub extra stain into the corners of the raised panel.
- Let the stain dry. Apply additional coats of stain to get the desired look.
This technique is very simple and really you can’t mess it up.
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