Saturday, August 30, 2014

Faux Crackle the Cheap way

Customise Your Home with Unique Furniture Pieces

Crackle is a perfect finish for transforming a shabby and boring piece of furniture into an aged rustic, distressed look and the impression that it is an heirloom.

Crackle is an easy faux finish to achieve and the technique can be applied to anything from doors, chairs, picture and mirror frames to Welsh dressers, cabinets, desks, and even kitchen units.
 
 

Getting Started

White board This is a way of achieving the crackle finish without the expense of Faux crackle paint systems.

Materials:

For practice purposes I recommend a piece of cardboard or cereal box cut to size or scrap piece of wood.

Acrylic paint. (Two colours)
Glue, all purpose wood glue “PVA glue” (polyvinyl acetate), In Spain Cola blanca from any Chino.
½" Paint brush.
Paint pallet
Gloves

Brush a white acrylic base coat to the board and allow to dry, then paint the PVA glue also covering the whole board.

For small spider web-like cracks lay it on thin and for thick wider cracks lay it on thick.

Wait for the glue to become tacky and then apply your top finish coat of Acrylic, this should be a darker colour so that the white will show through. Of course if you used a dark base coat then a lighter one would be used for the finish.
 
 

Finish

finished Now wait for the glue and the paint to dry, which depending on the temperature, should only take 2/3 hours.

Note: If you do not wait for the glue to become tacky it will have huge gaps, so it is best to wait for it to go tacky as it can be spread more even and you achieve a more subtle effect.

Equally waiting too late and letting the glue go off will not work either, but the point of this exercise is to practice and get the feel for the material, so you can save a lot of money when applying this to a piece of furniture.

This is the finish with various cracks and the darker back ground showing through or vise versa.

Once you have applied this to a piece of furniture, then simply spray a clear satin varnish which provides a hard durable finish and dries in minutes,

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