Annie Sloan Chalk Paint

I have always wanted to be able to paint furniture fun colors with a nice distressed look, but learning seems so daunting...I would read blog articles and not really understand how they did what they did, or have an understanding of the different products they used.  And I never found the time and energy to really dive in and just learn by doing.

With that being said I noticed Annie Sloan Chalk Paint was becoming popular (not chalk board paint) and was seeing it more and more on blogs and in nicer antique stores.  I decided when time and energy magically appeared that was the paint I was going to try and learn more about.  Around my birthday we were in one of those nice antique stores, that also happens to sell the paint, and I started asking questions.  Enough questions that the lady asked if I wanted to sign up for an Intro class to Chalk Paint.  DO I??????? Oh course I do!!!!!  Well at first I thought it might be too expensive and I should try and learn via blog and youtube, but since that has never worked well for me in the past AND Colin was on board to join me, we signed up! Yay!  It wasn't so much the painting I needed help with, it was the waxing and distressing I thought would be easier to learn in a class.

 

 

So sure enough we signed up and our class was last weekend.  It was awesome and we learned so much! And one of our neighbors was there too, we should have a block painting party! : )

Here are some images from the interwebs that show chalk paint being used so you get an idea of what I am talking about:

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And here are some images to our sample pieces we worked on in class.  I'll tell you a bit about each piece, but not too much, since I don't really know what I am doing yet and am not ready to give advice! I need to practice a bit and now that I have a basic comfort level, I want to check out a few blog posts and learn a little more. : )

The paint seems pretty easy to use, but waxing it after painting was a little tricky.  The wax protects the paint and the finished piece once you are done with it.  You can use clear wax or a dark wax to get a more distressed look. 

 

These frames they had pre-painted a dark base coat, then we picked a topcoat.  Once the top coat dried, we distressed with sandpaper to take off the second coat and reveal the darker first coat.  Then one of us played with a metallic wax just to see how it would look. 

 

 

 

On the pieces of ornate frames (how fabulous btw) we used multiple colors, then would distress by wiping the paint off rather than sanding.  Know what colors to mix and how much to distress was a little tricky.  You can see ours look a little different.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This little piece of molding is where we tried the dark wax.  Pretty cool stuff!

 

 

Stay tuned since I have a old mirror, table and bench calling our for some Chalk Paint in the near future!  And if all goes well, I am sure I can find a lot more to paint!