HOW TO BLEND CHALK PAINT- Beginner's guide to blended finishes

hi there i'm amy and today i'm going to talk to you about blending chalk paint i'm going to give you three tips that will help you get a really good beautiful blended piece next time you're trying to create a blended chalk paint look real quick before we jump into that i am going to attach below uh my furniture flip pricing worksheet if you're somebody who's interested in flipping furniture if you like to paint things and resell them like i do then this will help you figure out how much you should pay for something and how much you should charge for it and also keep a good record of what you got where you got it how much you paid for it and how much you sold it for so click on the link below if you want to check that out well i recently did a blended dresser for a client and it turned out beautifully she wanted this she wanted some reds in her room but without it being just completely overpowering and so we chose an inspiration piece that had some deeper darker red wine colors in it but also some of the bright red that she liked and i knew that it was going to involve a lot of blending so i decided to film some of that while i was doing it so that i could talk to you guys about what i think the best tips are you need to know in order to get a nicely blended finish on a piece of furniture when you're chalk painting so i'm i'm breaking it down into three things that you can remember the first is going to be tools the second is technique and the third i'm going to call tent because it's about the color i want you to be able to remember that these three things are the most important things to remember when you're blending all right let's start with tools so the tools you need obviously you need some chalk paint we decided to go with a bright red and then a deeper red and blend those together when you have two colors too that are analogous or close to each other they blend beautifully and that can make a very nice piece so we went with these two i went with waverly they're easy to get and not too expensive and actually pretty good quality for the price the next thing you for sure need is a spray bottle any kind of spray bottle will work and it needs to have water in it you want to put it on the finest mist that you can if you have one that's an actual mister those are great because they make it really really small fine mist you don't want big splatters of droplets of water and you want it to be a fine mist and the third thing that is really helpful is having a chalk paint brush you don't have to have a special chalk paint brush to do chalk painted pieces of furniture but when you're doing blending it really does help to have one of these that is has a rounded top like this because this will help you with the blending you can see that a flat brush and i use this a lot too when i'm chalk painting but a flat brush is going to be more likely to make sharp flat lines when you touch the furniture with it and something like this makes a much smoother softer spot when you touch it and your it's easier to get a blended finish with something like this now chalk paint brushes aren't super cheap these are these are my annie sloan brushes that i use i have one i use for dark colors and one i use for light colors you don't have to do that um but i wanted to find out about what a less expensive version would look like so i did get when i was in the store getting this waverly chalk paint i look to see if they have brushes and they do have one that's about 15 so i decided i would try it for this project to report back to you on how it works after using it i'll talk about a little later in the video it has more shedding than some of my hiring brushes so i'm not sure that it isn't worth it i think it's worth it to pay a little bit more to get one of these but if you can't do that this one certainly has a nice rounded top and it also held a good amount of paint and it put the paint on nicely it just had a little more bristles coming off than i would like and that that takes up some time to have to kind of pick out all the little bristles but i'll talk about that more when i'm showing you the the example of the piece i painted so your tools that you need hopefully you need your chalk paint you need your spray bottle and if you can get one of these rounded bristle brushes that's going to help you to make a nicer smooth blended area right in the transition between the colors all right tip number two is technique and the technique i recommend because you're going to need at least two coats of paint to do a piece of furniture so i recommend it on the first coat you just block in the colors where you want them to be and don't worry about trying to blend them so you put in the darker red first where you want it you put in the lighter red you let them dry and then you're going to go back in for the second coat and that's where you're going to start blending and tip number three that's going to help you have the outcome that you like is to really think beforehand about the colors that you are blending i know this this seems obvious but i think sometimes i see people do projects where they're not really thinking about what it's going to look like when the two colors blend so i want to recommend that you pop out your color wheel this is my little paint palette that i literally had since i was a child and this is where i learned so much about color theory i can't recommend enough that you try experimenting with mixing paint and look at the color wheel and how the colors are laid out this is really going to help you understand what color is going to do when you blend it and i spent so much time in my youth experimenting with this and figuring out what would happen but let me give you a real basic example so that you can see what i'm talking about if you have a room that's decorated in neutrals plus blue and yellow color scheme and you decide you want to do a dresser that you're going to blend the blue and yellow that's great just remember that here's blue and here's yellow and you are going to get all the colors that are in between on the dresser you can't blend them without these colors appearing so you may not want green in that room that may not be part of your color scheme but there will be green on the dresser in that transitional area because that color is what happens when you mix blue and yellow so just make sure that you're aware that that that's going to show up and that you're okay with that color being in your room more often what i see because we often recommend like complementary color schemes that people may not realize that if you have a room that has greens in it and then some red accents which is a nice color scheme or blue with kind of peachy accents terracotta and those are nice color schemes because they're complementary but because they are across from each other on the color wheel when you blend these together you're going to go into this color that's nothingness basically that's mud it's going to be this grayish brownish non-color in between that you may not like on your furniture because the more that red moves toward green the less red it becomes and the more green moves toward red the less green it becomes until in the middle you have basically a colorless color and if you're okay with that that's fine but if you're not i wouldn't recommend blending those two colors on a dresser or a piece of furniture and same thing with the blue and yellow example if you don't want green in there then you would be better to blend like blue and into white and then you'll have the blended look on a piece of furniture but it will all be blue getting lighter and lighter until it gets into a neutral color and that's going to probably work better and give you more versatility to use it in different places where you want so think about what colors you're going to get when you blend together experiment with it on some other piece before you put it on your piece of furniture and make sure that you're okay with all those in between colors showing up because you can't truly mix colors without all their all the rainbow that happens in between them showing up on your piece of furniture so keep that in mind and plan that carefully when you're deciding what colors that you want to use all right so remember the right tools the right technique and the right tone or tent that you're choosing when you're blending colors and that will get you on your way to having a beautifully finished piece now i'm just going to show you some some of the footage from when i was working on this piece and talk to you a little bit about more details about how to get this blending and how to make it look pretty okay the first thing i want to point out is that even when a piece is really nice and clean like this one you still need to clean it with some kind of degreaser or deglosser or this product is called crud cutter to help get any kind of polish or wax that's been built up on there over the years off of that and then give it a quick scuff sanding so that your paint will be able to adhere to the surface properly and you won't have problems with it scratching off next you want to start blocking in your first color i started with the darker color and remember if you're having trouble getting it to go on smooth you want to add some water i i mostly sprayed on my paint itself or on my paint brush to get enough water to get it going on their smooth once you've got your first color blocked in then you block in the second color you let them both dry and then you'll work on blending so you can see the setup i have here i have one paper plate with the burgundy paint and one brush with the burgundy paint i have another paper plate with the red paint and a brush with the red paint and i'm spraying primarily spraying the water either onto the plate with the paint or onto my brush until i get in into the blending section a little bit deeper you want to not go crazy with how much water you're spraying particularly on vertical surfaces because you can start getting drips and runny paint and the problem with vertical surfaces is that sometimes they won't start dripping until after you've already finished painting it and gone around to the other side and you won't realize that you have drips and these things are much harder to fix after they are dry if you don't catch them while they're still wet and when you're doing this blending technique it's it's harder even than normal to fix places that are drippy because you're talking about colors that are blended they're not just one solid color out of the can and so it's a little harder to do touch ups than it would be on a solid color piece of furniture so you want to really watch out for those and try to catch any of those problems before they happen and start drying now here what i've done i have painted the darker color all the way around the outside and then i've gone and gotten the bright red brush and i've painted a wet section just for the transitional area right there and then i am going to grab the darker brush wipe uh down some of the paint off of it with a dry paper towel so that the brush isn't loaded with paint and i'm spraying lightly spraying some water on and so now i'm starting to blend the transition with my burgundy brush i'm using the darker brush so that i can keep my red brush kind of a bright true red without getting it muddied up with a lot of burgundy but the trick i'm using here when i'm blending and i keep spraying lightly as i need to as i'm rotating the brush around as i go you can see that the side that has the burgundy paint on it stays to the outside the whole time i'm turning the brush and the side that has the brighter red stays to the inside the whole time and that helps me blend that transition what you've got when you have color one and color two you are creating color three when you're blending but if you're not careful you'll just end up turning the whole piece into color number three so you can't just be painting all over the place with a brush that has this mixture of colors on it and anytime you start getting too much of that middle color number three going then what you want to do is take the paint brush wipe it down with a dry paper towel so that you're offloading some of that color number three that mixed color and you're starting again with a brush that's fairly clean so every time that i need to dip back into the dark burgundy to do something closer to the edges i'm going to wipe dry wipe off some of that paint that's on the brush in the mixed color so that my burgundy paint will be more of a true burgundy when i want to do the outside edges and when i want to do the inside part in red i go back to my original red brush which is still a nice bright true red that's why i'm not muddying it up by getting any burgundy in there i'm keeping that color and i would recommend you pick one color that you're going to keep that brush pretty true usually the lighter color say you were doing black and white blended together i would probably keep my white brush a true white so that i can have some of that nice bright color in the center then you just keep on blending keep on mixing until until the transition starts to get really blended softly into that third color and the more you work on it the more you gently paint it the more you a little at a time add some water without going overboard the more you're going to start to have that subtle finish that you're looking for all right now while this is an example of me working on this side for for quite a while to get that nice subtle blended color i do want to warn you that if you ever start working into the paint and it seems like you are pulling up the paint from the layer underneath and you're starting to see almost the the body of the furniture the wood color peeking through then that probably means that you have reactivated the lower layers of paint that can happen sometimes with chalk paint when they get wet they can they can become liquidy again and sometimes you may pull up some of the lower layers of paint and start to see some of that furniture body peeking through if that happens it means you've overworked the paint a little bit and your best thing to do at that point is just stop let this layer that you're working on dry and once it's dry you can go back in there and do another layer of blending because if it gets like that and you keep on working on it and keep painting into it you're just going to start pulling up more of your paint and then it's going to be hard to get the finish to match all over in the places where that happens so it's better to stop let it dry and then just come back to it and do another coat that's not a problem because we do multiple point multiple coats on chalk paint all the time and it won't hurt you to step away from it and then come back and do another layer now if you look down at the foot board of this piece of furniture you can see that it's much smaller and i do want to tell you how to do a piece that has a detail or a small section like that it won't really work to use your big old chalk paint brushes like the ones i'm using right here that i have in my hand for a piece that size like that little board it's just too big you won't be able to get that subtle blending and those transitions of color and so what i did on those pieces these just have the blocked in two colors but what i did when i went back to finish it was i used a one inch flat brush and i did the same technique for blending but i just used a smaller flat brush not a rounded bristle brush and that's okay because a big giant brush like that just will not work for you to get those little tiny parts blended like like i'm doing down there and it worked fine to do that other brush on the bottom pieces but you want to use a bigger brush on the bigger panels if you can it'll go a lot faster now here you can see me having to pick out all the bristles from this waverly brush and this is why i would recommend getting a good one like an annie sloan brand chalk paint brush because you have less of the bristles coming out and it'll just save you some time and a little bit of trouble to have a little bit nicer quality of brush yeah well i hope that was helpful to you and that you'll try some blending projects if you have let me know hit me up in the comments or email me amy amydillard.com and show me pictures of your projects i would love to see that and join me next time for another talk about painting projects diys thrift flips furniture flipping all that kind of stuff i'd love for you to join us

Channel: Amy Dillard

Views: 664

Keywords: chalk paint, painted furniture, furniture makeover, how to paint furniture, chalk paint tutorial, annie sloan, chalk painting furniture, paint blending, dresser makeover, chalk painting, chalk paint blending, blend paint on furniture, chalk paint blending colors, how to blend paint, furniture painting, how to paint, chalk paint furniture makeovers, chalk paint dresser, painting furniture, how to chalk paint, Amy Dillard, furniture painter, diy furniture makeover

Id: OR0a7sc8m1k

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021