My husband is one of those guys who like nice wood furniture to look like Nice. Wood. Furniture.
Not me! I like nice wood furniture to look like it has been painted and repainted a million times and left outside for 20 years until it is cheerfully chippy, delightfully distressed and altogether awesome.
Can you believe this is the same little bench my husband didn’t want to paint? (Glad I didn’t listen to him!)
I didn’t need a million paint jobs or 20 years of weather to get this wonderful chipped-all-over look. I just used Real Milk Paint, the non-toxic, all-natural line of milk paint we carry at our shop All Things New Again in Leesburg, Virginia.
I also used my secret chip-ifying weapon: Real Milk Paint’s amazing new product aptly called Chippy Paste.
Here’s how I created this vintage look.
I cleaned the bench really well, lightly sanded it and painted a basecoat of Navy Blue over all of that nice wood. (Actually, it is wood veneer. My husband doesn’t care. He still liked it better before!)
Milk paint comes in a powder and is mixed with water in a 1:1 ratio to create the paint. Don’t let this step intimidate you! If you can mix chocolate milk, you can mix milk paint. You can even mix it right up in the can. Real Milk Paint makes it that easy for you!
Once the Navy Blue dried, I mixed three other colors: Yellow Rose, Granny Smith Green and Blue Spruce. I only needed a little bit of the accent colors so I just added a spoonful of paint and a spoonful of water to a rinsed-out yogurt container, stirred it up and let it sit for a few minutes to set up. Easy peasy.
Then I added crazy green and yellow swipes here, there and everywhere. Ultimately, the bench would be painted Soft White, but I wanted a few different colors to come through in the chips.
Here is what the bench looked like at this point in the process. (Yep. I paint right there in my kitchen. Real Milk Paint has no harmful fumes or chemicals.)
Now it was time for my secret weapon!
Chippy Paste is a new product. We are still experimenting with it, but so far my mom and I love it. You can create a beautiful vintage texture with milk paint, but it can be unpredictable. Sometimes you really want it to chip and it doesn’t. Or you only want it to chip in a few spots—and it chips everywhere else.
(It’s enough to drive a control freak crazy!)
With Chippy Paste, you can better control the chippiness of your paint project and create some beautiful vintage looks. After the base coat dries (and any other colors you want to add), just apply the Chippy Paste wherever you want the paint to chip.
On this little bench, I pretty much applied it EVERYWHERE!
Chippy Paste is thick like glue. You brush it on in sticky swipes … a little goes a long way. You can also add water to the product to thin it and make it easier to spread. My Chippy Paste started out really thick and was spreading more like sticky little crumbs than glue.
No biggie. Just squirt a little water into the container, stir it up and start spreading.
I left the “chippy paste crumbs” in place in many areas. The chips are very tiny, but all over. I really like the look.
I added water and applied more Chippy Paste. The consistency was more glue-y. (Not a real word, but I like it.) That’s where it chipped in bigger chunks, sometimes all the way down to the bare wood. I think that looks really cool too.
You can see how both looks blend together nicely in this photo.
Let the Chippy Paste dry for about 30 minutes then apply the last color. I used Soft White on the bench. When the paint dries, it will bubble up a little bit in the spots where you applied the Chippy Paste. Rub the surface with a damp scrubby sponge to remove the “chips.” I also used a paint scraper lightly over this bench and that worked well on the larger surfaces and in the crevices on the legs.
I really love how the blue shows through the white, but the other colors do as well — just like the bench has been painted a million times and left outside to weather for 20 years.
Finally, I added new floral fabric to the seat and trimmed it with a scrap of lace ribbon from my stash.
Because nobody wants to sit on nasty fabric that has been left outside in the weather for 20 years!
~ Courtney
All Things New Again is a family-owned furniture and paint boutique in Leesburg, Virginia (about an hour or so west of Washington, D.C.) We offer our own eclectic brand of hand painted furniture, several lines of easy-to-use paint for your next DIY project (including Real Milk Paint) and furniture painting classes.
