CAN YOU PAINT UPHOLSTERY WITH CHALK PAINT? Easy Upholstery Makeover

hey guys today we're going to ask the question can you really paint upholstery and is it worth doing or will it end up actually just being crunchy and gross and something that you don't actually want in your house we want to examine that and see if is this just a thing they say on the internet is this a real thing that you might want to do and if so what's the best way to do it what's the best way to get success and what are the best candidates for being painted so that you can make sure that you're going to end up with something you like instead of just ruining a piece of furniture and wishing that you had never tried it in the first place hi i'm amy i'm a painter and on this channel i talk about furniture painting furniture flipping mural painting and other kinds of diy home decor type projects so if you're interested in that kind of content give me a like or subscribe and i'd love for you to join me today i wanted to talk about painted upholstery there's a lot of videos talking about how to paint upholstery and showing different projects and i would say that some of them probably still look good several years later and some of them i'm guessing probably are not nice you know a little bit later after they were finished they might look okay on the video but they might not really be something that you still want in your house so i wanted to examine what are the best bets if you want to try painting some upholstery what should you look at as far as what's going to make it successful and what's not and what is in my experience the the most successful technique to be able to paint upholstery and i will tell you this couch that i'm sitting on is one that i painted and i did it years ago it still looks and feels great it's velvet um i've been super happy with it so this one has stood the test of time for sure and today i'm going to paint a chair that i've had for a while and we'll look at how that works and what technique i use and also why i felt sure that it would work well and what other types of things you should look for in deciding whether or not to paint a piece of furniture because once you paint it you can't un-paint it and the last thing you want to do is have a piece that you thought was okay before and then once you paint it it's terrible and so you basically ruined a piece of furniture or you need to pay to get it reupholstered or something like that so i wanted to talk about you know the best candidates for doing this so that you can have a pretty good idea of whether it's going to work or whether you're going to get the outcome that you're looking for and what what things you should be trying to do versus what things maybe aren't going to work okay like i said i painted this couch years ago and um it still looks and feels great the secret i think to getting the most success with painting a piece of upholstered furniture is think about the color that it was before think about the color that you want it to be and make sure that that technique is going to work with those two colors and with the materials for me what works the best is to treat it like a die you water down the paint until it's more like you're dyeing the fabric and then you let it dry you do something to kind of soften it back up so it won't be too stiff and then once it's fully dry it's basically kind of like you've dyed the fabric without having to pull it off the upholstery and put it into a bin and die so if you think of it that way you can see how that would work pretty well basically dyeing it without having to pull the upholstery off is a pretty good solution and it seems reasonable that that would work if you water down the paint enough that you're using it more like a die and then when it dries completely you will have basically the equivalent of a dyed piece of fabric now with that said you have to think about whether this project you're thinking about doing woodwork with dye so that's the thing i i see people kind of not mention in a lot of these is the easiest way to do painted upholstery is if you thin down the paint and treat it more like a dye but that means you need to think about what color you're using initially and what color paint slash die you're going to use and what color you're going to end up with because dies are sheer they're not completely opaque they're a little bit transparent and so the color that you have underneath does affect the ending color of of what you come out with so think about that if you had if you were trying to make tie dyed t-shirts and you had a white t-shirt and you got a bottle of rit dye that's yellow you can definitely dye that white t-shirt yellow no problem if you have a black t-shirt and you want to dye it yellow i would believe that it probably won't even change the color enough for you to see it at all it probably will still just be completely black and so that is a waste of your time that technique just doesn't work on a dark color with a light color die so think about that also if you had a yellow shirt and you wanted to dye it blue it might turn sort of greenish blue because the shirt is yellow underneath so again if you want it to be greenish blue that's awesome it'll work perfect you'll be really happy with the outcome if you don't you may not be happy with the outcome if you have an orange shirt and you want to paint it dye it green it it's probably not going to turn green it's going to kind of turn brown because orange and green mixed together it makes more of a brownish color so you've got to keep that in mind with what you're planning on painting also it's easiest if you're going to go from a light color to a darker color and it's easiest if you're going to keep them remotely within the same color family or if the color of the original color and the color of the paint you're using will blend into a color that you like and that you want so to me that's the secret if you're not super experienced with doing these things the best way to guess that it's going to turn out in something that you like is to think about how the two colors will work together and whether it would work if you were using dye to do that with these same colors one of the best videos for how to do this technique was done years ago by debbie's design diary and i will link that below because she did she did paint a couch a chesterfield style couch that turned out so pretty and she still has it i believe to this day and what she did was she painted a couch that was like a kind of a 70s gold color she used a paint that is called bohemian blue which is a dark teal blue color and what she ended up with is almost kind of like a bottle green velvet just a classic beautiful greenish blue velvet color it turned out gorgeous but i do want to point out that the yellow underneath did have some influence on the color and she was using a color that's a lot darker than the initial color so those are two of the things you need to do to have the most success so when i did this couch i'll find an old picture of it it was an aqua color and i loved it it was very pretty when i bought it i bought it on consignment but it faded it was sitting in this room with a lot of natural light and it had faded quite a bit and so some little spots and stains were starting to show up on it and so i decided to paint it gray because i decorate with a lot of that kind of color and because gray is not too far removed from aqua and the aqua had faded quite a bit it was very easy for me to change it to this color and so i was real happy with the way it turned out what i did was take an annie sloan graphite paint which is a very very dark gray she she doesn't have a black or she didn't used to have a true black graphite was the closest she had very dark gray and because it was such a dark color and i didn't want my couch to be super dark i watered it down a lot so that i was darkening it a little bit but not making it super dark and so the amount of water you mix into it will also be affected with by what color the paint is originally and what color you're trying to end up with so this kind of medium gray was pretty easy to do with a very watered down version of chalk paint in a dark gray color after i did that project i did have some of my watered down gray chalk paint left and so i decided to paint one of these faded red chairs that i had i had bought a pair of red chairs and because red is a color that fades easily these these velvet chairs clearly had been left in front of a window and so the front of the chair still looked pretty great they looked red and they were in pretty good shape the back of the chairs had faded to this pale pale beigey pink color it was like hugely different from the color of the front of the chairs and so i wasn't ready to reupholster them they weren't something that cost very much i decided to use the rest of the gray paint and put it on top of one of the red chairs well what i ended up with because i only did one coat of it what i ended up with was something kind of between a sort of the bluish gray paint i was putting on top and the red faded red pinky paint underneath what i got was this muted purple color sort of a faded amethyst color and that should show you i'll show you pictures that that should show you that the two colors blended there's a good chance that that's what you're going to get now if you keep doing more colors on top more of the paint color on top if i had gone darker with the gray or mixed the gray darker it would have gotten darker but it still would have been affected by that red color underneath it's pretty hard reds especially to make them disappear and pretend that they're not there so what i ended up with was this muted purple color which actually looks great in my guest room so i have that chair in there but that gives you an example of the same gray paint on a faded aqua couch turned into this medium gray color on a faded red chair it turned into a purpley amethyst muted color so that can give you kind of an idea of how the how the colors are going to turn out when you put them onto a fabric that's already there now in both of these cases what i was using was velvet and i think velvet is the easiest thing for you to start off with because velvet has this pile the soft shagginess on top and what you can do after you let it dry is you can kind of sand it or even brush it with a stiff brush to to kind of soften that pile back up kind of break up the stiff paint that's in the velvet pile and that really makes it feel soft and nice after you're through and not crunching and hard at all and so velvet's a pretty pretty good candidate for painting if that's something you're wanting to do so the project i decided to do this week was that other faded red chair it's been up in my son's playroom for a while which is kind of the area at the top of the stairs and so it has furniture in it that is not precious to us but it looks okay in the front and in the back which you don't really normally see when it's sitting there it's still that super faded pale beigey pink color and so i decided that i would paint the whole thing red and i felt confident that it would go back to red quite easily the front was already red and the back used to be red it just faded so this is another tip for you if you if you have furniture that's faded and you just want to recover the color that it used to be that should be pretty easy to do because really you're going darker and you're going within the same color family and like i said those are the two most important things to remember so i knew that staying in the color family of red and making it darker than it originally was and just putting it back to the original color would be relatively easy to do in this case i used some red chalk paint that i already had from a previous project i'll i will link that video up here because i did a video on blending chalk paint red into kind of a burgundy color and so i have red and burgundy chalk paint on hand that's left over from that project i don't use red that much so i decided to use it for this one i decided to use it straight out of the bottle color because with chalk paint you're going to end up you may end up using quite a bit of it depending on how much your furniture soaks up because you mix if you're using it like die you mix it with quite a bit of water and then you're going to put it on depending on how many coats you have to do you may you may need to mix some again so another tip i give you that's very important is if you mix your own color to get the specific color you want make notes and take measurements of how much you used i considered using the red and mixing some burgundy into it to make a little bit of a deeper red color if i had done that i would have measured how much of each color i used was it like two parts bright red to one part burgundy don't don't get real specific but like just kind of know how much of one color to how much of another and then how much water did i mix in to that combination that way i can mix some more of it when i need to without it turning into a completely different color so make sure that you know how you mix that color and that you have enough that you have access to those same colors again so you can mix more of it if you need more of it because very often you'll need more than one coat when i did this this red chair one coat was fine because the the color was very intense i watered it down quite a bit the faded red went straight back to red the color that was already red stayed pretty much red and so in one coat it immediately was a bright red chair again but often you'll need more than one coat and so make sure that you have access to get more of that color and that you can match that color that you know how much water you used to paint and how much of the different paint colors you use to mix together it's important to have a spray bottle of water with you and wetting down the upholstery before you start is a good way to make sure that the paint kind of goes on evenly so that you don't just stick your brush on it it all soaks in in one giant spot and then all the rest of it is thinner also you don't want to have to soak in more of it than you need because you'll just keep using more and more and more paint so if you if you kind of prime the surface of your of your fabric by getting it damp first then it will all suck up the paint kind of equally and it won't suck up more than you need it to because otherwise you can you can go through a lot of paint this way so it really helps if you spray it get it damp first i wipe it down kind of with my hand or with something so that i know it's sort of evenly dampened all the way across and then i start painting when you're painting you really want to go kind of up and down with the grain if you're doing velvet so that you're making sure that all those little pile fibers that are like little hairs that you're kind of getting above and below all of it all the way around so it's not just like you paint it one way and then if you move the pile the other way it's still not fully painted underneath you want to make sure you're really going up and down then once you've got it painted like that i spray a little more water onto it and go over it again up and down with the same brush to make sure that i'm really getting it down in there if you when you're on trim pieces or cording or in cracks or wrinkles or crevices you may need to do like a pounding motion with your brush just kind of like you would do when you're doing a stencil or something pounding tapping the paint down in there to make sure that it's getting all the way down into those cracks and crevices because later if you miss those when you sit down on the chair or couch if those if those wrinkles move then you may see a peek through of your other color and it may not be a big deal if those colors are really close but if you had like a white piece of furniture and you painted a dark color and you sit down on it and you suddenly see all these white places that you missed it won't look very good so make sure you kind of get down into all those cracks around buttons any kind of tufting any kind of cording and also in the place where the seat meets the back of the chair or couch or whatever those are going to be important places to make sure that you get down in there thoroughly when you're painting you want to work in sections the natural divisions of the fabric and of the piece of upholstery so work while it's wet until you get to a natural seam or a turn in the fabric so that it will all dry in one color you can go back with a sanding sponge that's what i recommend to kind of go over it and soften it up make sure that you use a clean a new sanding sponge that doesn't have any color on it because if you use one that that's one you use to sand wood and stuff like that or paint or things like that it'll have like like white paint particles or whatever you use before and that will get into your fabric and on your fabric and make a mess so try to use a clean one that hasn't been used before and then just rub back and forth until you start to feel the fabric soften up and feel the pile come back to have a normal feeling of velvet or whatever fabric it was before doing this sanding will cause some paint particles and paint dust to break loose and so you may even want to wear a mask while you're doing that but then it's a really good idea to vacuum the piece of upholstery really well after you're finished and that should get out all the extra dust or little paint particles and you should have a nice clean piece when you're done now a lot of people will tell you that after you do this technique and paint some upholstery after it's dry that you should seal it either with some kind of clear coat or with wax now i can see them saying that wax makes it feel softer after you get finished and so a lot of people recommend doing that i for one i i would never want to put wax on a piece of fabric i feel like it will just become a magnet for dust and dirt and that it won't age well over time i feel like eventually it will just get kind of sticky and gross and there's no way to really clean that off and so i have never done any of that to mine i've let them dry completely i've sanded or brushed them to soften them up and then they have done great just as they are so for me i i don't recommend putting wax onto a piece of fabric just as a person who's worked with fabric that doesn't seem like a good combination as far as clear coat i can see how that might seal in if you have a color like a red that you are worried is going to be transient although i don't find that most of these colors they're they're well pigmented and chalk paint and once they're dry on a piece of wood furniture they don't come off they're not coming off when you touch it or wipe it and so um i don't know that you would need to do that with a piece of fabric either i will i'll test this red chair that i'm painting and see how it works over time but um i think that a clear coat will make it stiffer and more hard and crunchy and so i would skip i would skip any kind of sealant or clear coat personally now there's probably a lot of different opinions on that but i'd like to i'd like to find out if any of you have waxed something and then you have it years later and it still looks great and isn't sticky or dirty or gross let me know in the comments i'd love to hear about that well good luck on your next creative project whether it's furniture flipping furniture painting or upholstery painting i'd love to hear about it in the comments below and thanks for watching you

Channel: Amy Dillard Gypsy Soul in Suburbia

Views: 23,012

Keywords: painted upholstery, chalk painting fabric, furniture makeover, furniture flip, painted furniture, annie sloan chalk paint, waverly chalk paint, diy furniture makeover, chalk paint, Debi's Design Diary, Amy Dillard, how to update old furniture, how to paint fabric chair, furniture diy, how to paint upholstery, how to paint furniture, chalk paint fabric, how to paint upholstery and keep it soft, how to paint furniture with chalk paint

Id: pScutMc5xl4

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 27 2022