faux painting

Your Home A Living Canvas: Create Stunning Faux Finishes & Murals with Paint

I think decorative and faux painting techniques look great, are fun to do, and add a personal statement to a room. I’ve been adding my personal look to the walls in my homes ever since my husband and I purchased our first “fixer-upper.”

When I first starting using faux and decorative painting techniques on the walls in our home it was a financially motivated action. We didn’t have a lot of extra money. I couldn’t afford new furniture or flooring for a room but I could afford to buy some paint.

But just painting the walls a solid color seemed boring to me so I started exploring faux and decorative painting. It didn’t take me long to get hooked. Why do I like faux and decorative painting on walls so much?

1) It’s an inexpensive way to change the look of an entire room. Paint is the most economical way to change the look of a room.

2) A painting technique on the walls minimizes and hides cosmetic flaws such as surface cracks and less than perfect patching jobs.

3) It’s easy to change when you’re sick of it. Repainting a room that has paint on the walls is a whole lot easier and much less time consuming than stripping wallpaper off walls and preparing those walls for paint.

4) It adds your own personal look and style to a space. Color and texture are fun and interesting. An entire home painted the same off-white color is dull and boring to me.A faux painting technique can evoke any mood you want in a room whether it’s a Tuscan look, retro 70’s look, a country look, something elegant, a cheery bright look for a child’s room, or any other look you want.

5) The choices of techniques and paints are nearly endless. Some of the more popular technique choices include: sponging, ragging, dragging, color washing, stenciling, crackling, marbling, gilding, wood-graining, spattering, feather-dusting, and stippling. You could also use one of the specialty paint products on the market today such as Venetian plaster to create the look you want or buy a faux painting kit such as a Woolie painting kit to help make your project as fun and easy as possible.

While I highly recommend faux or decorative painting, there are a few things I’ve learned since I’ve started faux painting that I’d like to share with you. Some of these items are things to “not do” that I’ve learned the hard way. Others are tips and suggestions that were helpful to me.

Go to your local paint store or decorative painting store and look at the samples they have.For example, Home Depot has lots of different booklets and paint chips with faux paint finishes on them for you to look at and even take home to look at in your lighting. That pretty metallic finish on a paint chip in the store make look garish when you get it home and look at it in your home’s natural lighting.

Consider taking a class before doing your first project. Some paint stores and home improvement stores, such as Home Depot, offer free faux painting clinics and workshops.You can also find some very good faux painting classes for a reasonable fee by looking in your local paper or doing an Internet search.

Practice your technique on a piece of scrap wallboard before doing it on your wall. This is especially important if you are blending colors.A few years ago my son wanted his bedroom painted. He wanted me to use a Wooliel Faux Tool (a great faux painting tool available at most paint supply stores) to blend together a burgundy and a caramel color.Each color looked great by itself, but when they got blended together too much a dark fuchsia color emerged. And anything resembling pink was not something my son wanted on his wall!

Because I had been faux painting for years I didn’t listen to my own advice about trying the technique on a piece of scrap board first nor did I buy sample sizes of paint to try out. I bought gallons because I wanted to save time.

Luckily the store agreed to exchange the paint for me free of charge but we did have to paint over a wall and wait for it to dry before starting over with new colors.

Remember that the texture of your walls will dictate, to some extent, what faux painting techniques you can and cannot use.If your walls are smooth you can do just about any technique you want. But textured walls are very common, especially in newer homes.
You may see striped walls in a brochure or on a sample wall and decide that’s what you want to do in your home; but if your walls are textured it’s going to be nearly impossible to achieve straight lines for your stripes.

If you’re going to do a faux technique in an entire room don’t start on the wall that people will first look at when they walk into the room.
That means don’t start on the wall directly across from the doorway.

Unless you’re a professional, it takes a little while for you to get your technique perfected in a room. Put that less than perfect start in the least noticeable part of the room.

If you get tired while painting and need a break, don’t stop in the middle of a wall. Stop at a corner. If you stop in the middle of the wall and don’t come back to work on the project again until after the paint is dry, you’re going to have a noticeable line on the wall. It won’t be pretty.

Think twice about mixing your own color with paint you have at home unless you are absolutely positive you’re going to have enough paint to do the entire job.
If you mix your own color and run out of paint before you finish it will be time-consuming and challenging to match that color.

You might be able to match it because many paint stores have specialty machines that can match a paint chip you take in, but if you’ve mixed together two different sheens of paint (for example let’s say you mixed a flat paint and a satin paint together) you’re going to have a hard time reproducing that same sheen. In some cases it may not be noticeable; but in other cases it will.

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Dorrie Ruplinger is a featured writer for
http://www.decorativepaintingzone.com. Visit the web site for more information on decorative painting and
faux painting.

The Art of Faux: The Complete Sourcebook of Decorative Painted Finishes (Crafts Highlights)

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Would you love to know how to Paint over Wallpaper?

Before you get in to How to Paint over Wallpaper… let’s make sure you know the downside of this little operation.

Paint is liquid and when liquid is added to wallpaper, the paper might just come off the wall. It may come down in sheets or just bubble up in some interesting places. If your wallpaper is stuck, I mean really stuck and it’s going to be damaging to the wall to take it down, then you may want to paint.

So you have made the leap to paint and now you want to know just the facts about how to paint over wallpaper.

Make sure the surface is in good condition. Take a small putty knife or blunt kitchen knife and go along every seam and the ceiling and base cuts and see if you can lift even the tiniest little bit. Any tears or lifting needs to be glued down. If you have wallpaper paste this will work, I have also used white glue. Use a pin to prick any air bubbles and try to get the glue in and stuck down. Go over the entire wall with you hands, you will feel even the slightest imperfection that the eye will gloss over… Until you paint it that is. Some of the tiny tears or imperfections can be sanded with a light hand giving a smooth transition from paper to wall.
Paint a small area of the paper to see if it will hold. Wait until it is fully dry and test to see if the paper is really still stuck to the wall. Try this in several areas including the seam area. If the wallpaper starts to fall off the wall, you have no choice but to strip. If it comes of in just a few areas, tear it off and you can repair those areas in the next few steps.
Clean the walls. I know what you are thinking… Yuck, washing walls. But, if the paper has been up awhile you need to get off dust, fingerprints, food and any soap or glue residue. Start with the cleanest possible surface for good results.
Remove all the switchplate and outlet covers. Cover all the exposed areas with painters tape to protect you from a shocking experience. You should think about turning off the power to these walls before painting. Just to be safe.
Spackle… Every joint and every repair. I have used caulk to seal the bottom and top cut edges to give a clean finish. You may need to repair those impossible tears with joint compound more than once. Dampen all the imperfections to prime the area before appling spackle or joint compound. Let all this dry… I mean dry. Then sand it smooth. Trust me, you do not want to skip this step. After all is sanded, wipe – wipe and wipe again. No dust remember?
Now you must prime. All the big box stores carry good primers. You may need two coats if the paper had a dark print or the print bleeds. Get the primer tinted – It’s free and will cut down the coats of top coat you will need to apply. Wait 24 hours for the primer to dry. Wet wallpaper takes longer to dry.
If anything bubbles up overnight, slit it open and repair with glue. Make sure to clean the surface and let that dry also.
Here comes the tricky part… by now you will see the texture of your wallpaper. If it’s smooth, then nothing is stopping you from getting your color on. If it has texture, and it’s a problem (ugly) then one option is to faux paint the wall. This is simple and will give you a professional looking wall instead of a messy painted wallpaper wall. Faux painting is easy to learn and fast to accomplish. Faux finishes cover up a lot of problems.
Tape off all the areas that are not to be painted. Including the ceiling and adjoining walls. Protect your floors and furniture, paint has a way of migrating to some very unusual places.
After you have all the walls looking perfect…now comes the cherry on top. Those outlet and switchplate covers need to be customized. Nothing says amateur more than white covers on a great custom colored wall. Sand, prime and paint your covers. Let dry 24 hours and then seal with a clear coat or two. Let dry again and install.

Beautiful walls and the background to a room. Never let those cute wallpaper samples fool you. It’s much easier to change the theme of a room if you haven’t committed yourself to a theme wallpaper.

If you want themes, learn to paint or stencil on your walls. These can be painted over in a snap!

Have fun and Lets Go Get Our Paint On!

If you decide that Stripping The Wallpaper is a better idea… This little steamer is a sure bet. I love it!