Learning Experiences

Alas, my knitting still suffers as home improvement jobs beckon.

I've been learning a lot, which IS one of our goals with this house. Mostly a lot about paint. Mostly what not to do with paint.

First I decided I wanted to use the technique of sponge painting in the living room. All the examples I saw had a light/medium base coat with a medium/dark coat over it. I, of course, decide that I would use two dark colors. Sure, there were no examples of that, but there was nothing saying I couldn't do it.

I'm using Behr paints from Home Depot. I decided to do the base color in Warm Brownie and sponge over it with Burnt Tile. You can check out the colors here, but their representation on my monitor is awful. The colors are basically very warm brown and brownish-burgundy. I want a mottled brownish-dark red look on the walls with dark red as the predominant color, toned down by the warm brown. I prefer the depth of sponging to the flat look of a single color.

So we painted all the walls Warm Brownie. Following instructions, I mixed one part Burnt Tile with four parts Faux Glaze and began sponging. Badness ensued. The Burnt Tile took on a distinctly pink look - dark mauve at best. I stopped after doing a section of wall to see how it would look dry. Once dry, you couldn't even tell I had sponged on anything...unless you looked really closely and then you could see faint hints of Dark Mauve.

So. Dark color mixed with glaze over dark color does not work. Hmm. Tonight I experimented with 3 different sections of wall. I'm still using the Burnt Tile color. One section is straight paint sponged on, one section is straight paint sponged off, and one section is the previously mixed paint/glaze sponged off.

I'm still waiting for the sections to dry thoroughly, but so far the sponged on paint in section one is barely visible...more visible than my last attempt at sponging on, but still not the effect I want. Sections two and three are significantly better. You can at least see the second layer of paint. It's still more translucent than I'd like in section three, but the addition of glaze definitely makes the sponging off much more even.

Tomorrow I'm going to try a 55/45 mixture of paint and glaze and see how that looks. I'm hoping it'll be enough paint to be dark enough but enough glaze to make the effect more even.

I've got some really cool things planned for our room upstairs. Rather than a door, I've decided on a heavy velvet portiere (fancy word for curtain) in deep green. We're going to paint the knee wall in Forest Rain (a deep forest green, also Behr). We'll be colorwashing the sloping eaves that form the ceiling with a base of Debonair Blue and combined glaze colors of Beautiful Fountain and Parisian Sky. We'll be doing the washing with a Woolie to give it a subtle cloudy sky appearance. Eventually we want to find a vine-textured carpet in a suitable green. We saw something that might work at Home Depot. We'll also be doing baseboards and trim at the top of the kneewall that have a vine pattern. We're going to stain them a dark walnut (think tree branches). We're hoping for an overall woodsy effect without something as obvious as painting trees and clouds in the room ;)

It should be neat....especially once we've put in the skylights. Hopefully I can get some good pictures, too :)

Posted by Amber at March 16, 2004 11:56 PM