How to Faux Paint

Video Transcript

"I'd like to talk to you about some faux painting techniques. Faux means fake. Anytime you take a glaze and manipulate it with a tool you're creating a fake finish, which is a faux finish. I'm going to show very quickly several methods of glazing. I just have a green glaze mixed up here, which is a water-based, which is glazing liquid, which is a transparent paint, some people call it, with some color added to it. So it is a transparent glaze. The whole ideas is that the underground shows through the top. You can apply this, I will show you how to rag. In most cases if I'm ragging, I'm ragging off and it's a large surface, which means big rooms, and the water-base is going to dry too quickly, and I will use oils. The ragging is not that popular of a finish anymore. If you do rag on or rag off in water-base it's going to dry very quickly and you'll end up with lap lines, overlaps, dark places where it dries.This of course is going to work, it's a small little surface. I take a rag, cotton rag, apply the glaze, usually with a roller, and literally rag role the surface off. I also take the same rag, because I'm not crazy about large patterns or ugly stops and goes, and it's called pouncing. You take the rag and pounce all over the surface until it's softened and you don't see, oh a rag did this, the whole idea is that you're creating a subtle beautiful finish, like that. Okay, now we're going to look at some stria finishes. A stria is removing a glaze in a vertical or horizontal fashion. There are many different methods. You can use a wallpaper brush, you can use a notched out squeegee which will create a combing affect, you can also just use a brush as a dragging tool, and drag it vertically or horizontally creating. This again will be a water-based blaze because I have very small surface. In theory if I'm removing a glaze I'm going to use a oil-based product, because it has an open time which gives more time to remove it before it dries, a water-base is going to dry very quickly. But for demonstration, we would apply a glaze, transparent paint to the base coat and take a tool and remove it. This one is a notched squeegee that I had notched with a knife. Carefully as you could in that pull down fashion, one time. The problem on a big wall is if you're going down the wall and you move, you're going to get wood grain, not a stria. So this is an advanced technique of combing. It's also good to comb the walls one way, in one direction, allow it to dry and then next day drag the opposite way and you'll end up with a beautiful silk like pattern. Another method would be to drag through the glaze with a brush, any 3 or 4, 5 inch brush would do, I just happen to have this one, it's also a flogging brush, and drag through the glaze as straight as you can, and that removes the glaze in a vertical fashion creating this look, the stria or dragging."