One Graphics Fairy French Design…Three Uses

You can start with an old piece that looks like it’s seen better days:

or some cupboard doors from the 80′s:

or a new piece of furniture in its “raw” unfinished state:

and with a little knowledge of furniture finishing techniques you can end up with the same great look at the end.

Paul and I are production painters and will often repeat a design on several pieces of art furniture. In this case we started with three pieces from different era’s….old, newer and super new…but wanted to achieve the same look with all three.

Easy, peasy…

We followed the distressing tutorial and we painted all of the pieces with paint, followed the same distressing steps and simply adjusted the final design for the finished painting.

We both love the wonderful French topography that we find at the Graphics Fairy and particularly liked this design that Karen put together herself.

I resized it depending on the size of the finished piece using the steps we wrote about in our very first tutorial and then applied the pattern by tracing it with grey graphite paper and painting the design with the raw umber seen below. Don’t apply the paint too heavy or the finished effect will not look old and faded.

After the design was fully painted, I sanded lightly to further age the look of the paint and applied two coats of Heritage MultiMedia non yellowing, UV protected varnish. Here’s the finished pieces:

So, I started out with three pieces from different time periods, each with it’s own set of challenges and ended up with this.

You gotta love the power of paint!!!

Thanks for visiting,

Cathy

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