The New - Week 7 (Adventures in Paint)

We have been making some serious progress on our home renovations and a few days after Christmas the new rooms were ready to paint. Now, I'm no stranger to painting walls - I've not only painted my own walls, I've painted my parents', my in-laws', my friends', pretty much anyone who will let me near their naked walls with a paint brush and a can of paint. Needless to say, my New for this week is not your basic wall painting. However, I'm always looking to try new painting techniques. Thus far I have done sponging on, sponging off and stripes (vertical and horizontal). This time around I thought I would try something different - colour washing!

I have a book from Home Depot called Decorative Painting 1-2-3 and I used that as a guide. First step was picking out paint. We opted to go with two colours that matched our new bed comforter. Based on the wisdom of the paint store attendant I bought 2 gallons of the base coat (WAY more than I needed), a quart of the top coat and 2 quarts of glaze (that's all they had left).

First step (the easy part), was painting the walls with the base coat, twice. This was of course done after we put primer on the walls. Can I just say that painting walls without trim and with plywood as the floor is AWESOME! No need to tape, no need to put down drop cloths - my kind of painting!

Now for the decidedly hard part: the top coat, a.k.a. colour wash.

I started by mixing 1 part latex paint (in this case, 1/2 quart) with 4 parts of the glaze. Armed with my trusty paint brush - I was ready!

Now, according to the 'authors' of the book I was to start by cutting in the corners with my paint. (If you have no idea what that means, don't worry, neither did I - hello google!) Cutting in the corners is basically how you paint a line where two edges meet. To 'cut in a corner' you paint out from the corner using several brush strokes one after the other and then you smooth them over with a long, smooth stroke.

From there you make random crosshatch patterns with the glaze paint. Crosshatch is just a fancy way of saying "make x's". And you continue making x's and try to complete one section before drying lines appear. (ha ha ha ha...ugh) Okay, so my first attempt at colour washing was not a success. The glaze which is supposed to help keep your paint from drying too quickly, did not seem to be doing what it was supposed to. I managed to finish 2 walls before it got too dark for me to see and I was not at all happy with the results!

Great thing about painting is that if you totally mess it up, you can always paint over it and start again...which is exactly what I did.

Regroup - new plan. Find a better book or video that shows how this method is supposed to work successfully. Youtube was not super helpful. I sent my hubby to the library to get 5 different books about faux finishing and NONE of them said anything about colour washing! Then by some fluke, in my random searching I stumbled upon a video that clearly showed how this technique was supposed to work. Back to the hardware store to get some new tools and some more glaze.

For this new technique, I again mixed up 1 part latex paint (the other half of the quart) with 4 parts of the glaze. This time however I was using a mini roller and a damp cloth. Basically you roll the glaze onto a small section of wall and then you use the damp cloth in a circular motion to wipe off some of the glaze. You are supposed to end up with a beautiful colour washed affect. I ended up with my base coat walls and small bits of the lighter glaze. Seems this colour wash effect doesn't work so well when your base coat is darker than your glaze coat.

After my second failed attempt, I played around a bit and the results were a little better.

But in the end, I liked the plain walls the best - so once again I painted over the effect. As you can imagine, I was glad that I had the extra gallon of paint after all.

The "finished" product

The moral of the story: Not everything you try is going to work out. The fun is in the experimentation and the journey. Don't be afraid to fail. What are you going to try "new" this year?