Furniture painting technique- crackle & antique gold

One of our most recent furniture painting projects involved staining, crackling, sponge painting and gold accents. This incredibly elaborate antique chest, cabinet or armoire (I’m not even sure what to call it) was a really fun project. It involved lots of steps and a lot of tedious hand work, which I’ll share in detail below. It turned out awesome, if I do say so myself, so all the hard work was well worth it.

Prime! We don’t always prime, but because this piece was so badly stained with cigarette smoke we Knew priming was a must. I prefer to use water based products whenever I can, but because nicotine is a water soluble stain, so an oil based product is absolutely neccessary. I use a spray gun for most of the painting that I do and I never put oil based products in my gun. The clean up is a nightmare that I don’t want to deal with, plus it usually stinks!

For this project I purchased a spray can of Kilz oil based primer. I applied one good coat of primer and let it dry over night.Then I tossed the empty can in the trash. No clean up, yipee!

Prep work done. Now what?

Stain! Using Minwax stain in Dark Walnut we stained this entire piece. Using a saturated rag we wiped the entire piece with the dark stain, leaving it on pretty heavy in all of the carved details and recessed areas. We allowed the stain to dry for a few days before taking the next step.

Lightly sand! We lightly sanded the stain so our next layer would stick well. We used 220 grit sand paper then wiped it with a clean damp cloth to remove the dust.

Crackle! We used a product called Faux Creations from Sherwin Williams. It was applied with a 2 inch synthetic bristle brush. The entire piece was covered in an even, thin layer of the stuff. Before applying the top coat there is an hour of down time. Don’t let this product sit for longer than 4 hours or it will not do its’ job properly and you will have waisted your time and the product.

Paint! A top coat can be applied with a brush for large, heavy cracks. Because we wanted a ton of tiny, fine cracks we used a sea sponge to apply the top coat. I prefer using a sponge over a brush because I feel like I can get better coverage. I also feel like it is easier to control. With a brush you have to be very careful. If you go over the same spot more than once you will scrape the paint off in chunks and ruin the crackle finish. It’s also easy to get runs and big blobs of cracks that slide off your piece when using a paint brush.

We used another Sherwin Williams product for the top coat. The paint color is called Medici Ivory. It’s a beautiful soft white. I think it looks like linen.

A few spots were hard to get at with the sponge, mainly in the 90 degree angles. I waited for the top coat to completely dry and then came back with a tiny brush to stipple a bit of white paint into the areas where I had missed.

Hand paint! We used gold craft paint to really draw attention to some of the ornate details. This paint was applied with a tiny artists brush. Gold is a tough one as far as coverage goes. It required three coats of gold to get the look we wanted.  After the gold was dried we lightly sanded some of it to distress it a bit.

Stain again! Last, but not least, we stained the piece one final time. We really wanted to draw attention to the gorgeous details on this piece and knew that stain would add the perfect shadows. However, we did not want to stain the entire piece. In order to keep the stain from drastically changing the color of the overall piece we used the Minwax along with Howard’s bees wax. The bees wax helps dilute the stain, making it easy to lightly buff the entire piece with a hint of color, while leaving it super dark in all of the cracks and crevices.

Stain was applied with a brush. It was only applied to the recessed areas, such as, the faces, the carved detail along the bottom, and in the curve of the legs. Then using a dry rag we wiped most of it off. To blend the colors we then used a rag soaked in bees wax and buffed the entire piece.

The following video will show this piece transform step by step. It also includes instructions.