Crackle Effect, Part 2

As I wrote in Crackle Effect, Part 1, crackling furniture is a big fat pain. Briefly, you paint a top coat, put on a crackle medium, and then, if done right, you put on a top coat that will "crack" and allow the base coat to show through these cracks. Sounds easy, but the top coat cracks quickly, so you only have a minute or so to get that top coat on before it gets clumpy and instead of pretty cracks, you often get a clumpy mess. If you mess up, you cannot just scrap off that top coat, you have to get rid of everything and start again with the base coat. Believe me, I know from experience.

After using glue as a crackle medium and not liking the effects, I decided to revisit a true crackle medium. I am cheaper than cheap, so instead of going straight to Sherwin Williams to buy the product I had used ages ago when I first tried crackling, I headed to Lowes for the Valspar crackle medium. I was not happy with the effect. To quote my husband, it did not look aged, but camouflaged. He was right, the brown base coat showing through an off-white top coat looked like a confused giraffe, blotchy instead of pretty antique cracks. So I scraped/sanded it all off and made a trip to Sherwin Williams, which is what I should have done in the first place.

Rather than redo a whole piece of furniture, I got smart and tried it on just the shelf. I'd rather mess up one small part than the whole thing. The shelf turned out beautiful and the results I got on the whole shelf were great, so my advice on crackle is to PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE before trying it on a piece of furniture, and to use good crackle.

Crackling is still not my favorite effect, I find it hard to avoid top-coat runs and clumps. And it is really hard, even when using high-quality paints, to get the top coat to cover the base coat fully. Not a big deal where it cracks, but where there are no cracks and the base coat show through the top coat, I personally think it looks weird. I've tried I second coat of top-coat, but it either covers up too much of the cracks, and you can tell the area has been "touched up", or it smears the crackled paint, creating lumps.

The pics I have with the narrative are in the order of the process. I do not have one of the complete shelf since a pic of the whole does not do it justice. But the pics are, in order, 1. FINISHED; 2. the shelf in its original state; 3. base coat; and 4. crackle coat.

Crackle Effect, Part 1

Crackling furniture is a big fat pain. The idea is to paint one color (base coat) and then paint a second color (top coat) over it, but have the top coat "crackle" so that the base coast shows through. It is a very aged look and incredibly cool if you can get it right. And that is the problem, getting it right. I have no problem putting the base coast on and applying the crackle. It is applying the top coat that can be a big nightmare. You have one shot to get the top coat on, and you literally have about a minute before the top coat starts to crackle. If you go too slow, the crackling top coat will smear all over the place, giving a lumpy, smeared look instead of a nice crackle finish. If you totally mess up, you have to redo the whole piece, which involves lots of scraping and sanding. Usually both the messed up crackle coat AND the nice even base coat comes off in this process, so you basically have to start all over again if you mess up the crackle coat. I will not go into how many times I have had to "start over".

The proprietor of Treasures asked me if I could crackle. I've attempted it in the past and found it frustrating, but I was ready to try it again if she thought it would be a popular look. Last time I crackled a piece of furniture, I had used Sherwin William's crackle medium. Around the time I did that piece of furniture, a couple of different people had told me you could crackle using glue, and since my SW medium had since dried up, I decided to try the glue method. A google search told me that any glue would work (I went with Elmer's school glue) with a hair dryer.

Like the standard crackle medium method, you do have to go fast, but I found the top coat did not smear nearly as much using glue as it did when I tried a crack medium. But the cracks were not quite the look I was going for. So while it was easier to avoid making gloppy mistakes, the crackle effect was less "aged" looking to me. So on my next crackle attempt I decided to go with a crackle medium instead of glue (see Crackle Effect, Part 2).

I should note that I did not take a "before" pic, or if I did, I cannot find it on my camera. The original shelf was a dark wood. The base is white, the top coat is a blue/grey.

Mirrors

A dresser I acquired came with two mirrors. I thought both mirrors looked weird mounted on this one piece of furniture, and just one mirror was too small for the dresser, so I painted the dresser separately and then decided to experiment with the mirrors. One I did with a gold finish, the other I did with an off-white crackle over the existing dark wood.