Annie Sloan of England brought her Chalk Paint to the American market. Formerly only available in Europe, the formula is now produced and distributed in Louisiana.
Her American tour, March 1-15, takes place in Louisiana, Mississippi, California, Texas, North Carolina and New Jersey. To learn more, go to her website: here
Virginia Weathersby, owner of The Southern Institute of Faux Finishing in Brandon, MS hosted the one-day workshop on March 4. For the website go here: TSIFF
This workshop, taught by Brit Annie Sloan was to introduce her paint line called Chalk Paint to American painters. As the old addage goes, "necessity is the Mother of invention", Annie created Chalk Paint to get the desirable properties in a paint where others failed to perform to her liking.
What is Chalk Paint and how is it different? In Annie's words, this water-based paint available in 24 colors is a soft matte paint for use on almost anything to allow the user to work in an independent, intuitive and creative way.
You can create a distressed French or Swedish look, a plaster look, a washed wood look or even do a blackboard. Each of the 24 colors can be expanded to more colors by combining paints.
This storyboard shows examples of fabulous applications on furniture, walls and doors. Love that door on the right.
The 21 women and men in this workshop prepared six boards to demonstrate the techniques: Two Color, Textured Colored Wax, Clouded Stipple, Crackle Paint, Textured Paint and Lime Look Wash. Starting with this:
And ending with this:
I guarantee you this is not difficult. It is a lot of fun and you can do it too. Students in the class ranged from professionals who make their living faux finishing to students who had never painted before.
I'll walk you through a few of these techniques. The first one is the Two Color Technique on a piece of egg and dart molding.
Let dry between each coat.
The secret here is the English wax. Clear always goes on first. Wipe off excess brown wax to suit your taste. Below is what the Hannant's wax looks like.
Next, sand through to expose the underlying color. You can distress as much or little as you like.
Here's the end result. See, how easy was that. With a little instruction, you can paint anything.
Let's walk through another one. This is my favorite called Clouded Stipple.
Versailles is the base coat. Then dapple on small amounts of Old Violet and Old White with the tip edge of your brush and merge to make cloudy.
Brush on sizing and let get tacky. Then apply the gold leaf sheet.
This is how mine looked.
You can also remove some of the brown wax by using another coat of clear wax.
I won't run you through all six finishes step by step. Here are some random shots of the Textured Colored Wax, Textured Paint, Crackle Paint and Lime Look Wash.
Wipe off as much or as little of the brown wax as you prefer. That was easy, wasn't it?
And you're done!
Here are various finishes you can create with Chalk Paint.
And here are photos of the class.
I hope you enjoyed your class with me in Brandon, MS via this post.
If you would like to take a Chalk Paint class, the next one at The Southern Institute is April 15.
All the best,
Summer
Photos: Swede
