The Art of Creating Faux Woodgrain Effects

Making faux wood grain is not as difficult as you might have imagined at first. While it is definitely hard to paint faux wood grain with just a paintbrush, you should definitely look into purchasing faux wood grain tools instead. These tools can be used to achieve a faux wood grain design without a lot of trouble.

You can purchase faux wood tools either online or in a craft store near you. You will find that these tools make it very easy for you to put together a wall design that works for you. However, it is not entirely straightforward if you have never done any faux wood painting before.

Getting Started

The first thing that you need to do before you can start painting the walls is to make sure that they are all clean, newly painted, and sanded down. Therefore, if the walls are rough in any places, you should make sure that you get out your sander. The reason for this is that if the wall is rough to begin with, that may make it difficult to use the wood grain tool.

The color that you should use to paint the background is whatever color will work best with the color scheme you want in the room. The easiest way to determine which colors you should use is to look at a type of wood that you like. Then you should figure out which colors match the ones that dominate in that type of wood. There will be a lighter tone, and a darker tone that makes the rings in the wood.

You should use the lighter tone to paint the background walls. Depending on how dark the wall paint was behind this tone, you may have to paint several coats to get the right effect.

When To Paint

Although you can start painting as soon as you think that the base coat is dry, you should probably wait an entire day to start. That way, you won’t have to worry about ruining the wood grain design by smearing it against the base coat.

Next, you should take the color you have chosen for your wood grain and paint that down the length of the wall from top to bottom. You should not put a particularly thick layer of this paint onto the wall, however. It is going to be the parts of the wall where the base coat shows through that makes the wall look like it has wood grains.

After you paint the wall with the wood grain color, you should go over this wall with cheesecloth. Just rub the cheesecloth down the wall from top to bottom. This should result in a few streaks in the paint.

These streaks are going to end up making the wood grain design – now you are ready to use your tool. You should be careful and start from the bottom, working your way down. Just run the tool over your paint very slowly, and rock it back and forth. You should end up creating a design that looks like real wood grain – complete with knots in the wood!

If you like wood designs, but you do not want a brown room, then you can also use other colors as well – just keep in mind that the base coat should be a lighter version of the color that you use to make the wood grains.