So we left off last week, and Daphne had received her first coat, the decoupage was down with the WoodUbend mouldings were on, framing the decoupage. This week, things take on much more of a boho furniture vibe as I got stuck into some serious colours.
First on my agenda was to just incorporate the colours from the decoupage into the piece as a whole. It was at this point I began to understand that I had a piece of boho furniture on my hands. The decoupage had a lot of vibrant yellows and pinks in it. In recent times I’ve swayed to darker styles of furniture so I was very excited to be able to throw some colours at this that I usually wouldn’t do.
So I got to work using Cornish Milk Mineral Paint and began to get to work. Posh Chalk Metallic Pastes come in some very vibrant colours so I jumped at the chance to break out my Red Alizarin and Yellow Canary, I even managed to sneak in some Red Medium Cadmium and Violet too! I used a combination of the milk paints and pastes to really being to develop the colour scheme on the front. Although the pastes are thick, they are water-based so can quite easily be watered down and used as a paint or even wash. The more colours the better on a piece of boho furniture, right?!
Normally I would use a pointed brush to really get into the mouldings, however, as I had already pre-painted the WoodUbend in a very dark shade, I didn’t want to really dig into the crevices of the moulding. I was looking to keep that depth to the whole design so a simple bit of dry brushing would suffice. It’s boho furniture after all, we want a lot of stuff going on.
Blending paints, especially on boho furniture projects is often a labour of love, blending is a living breathing beast and you’re never really going to get the same blend, the same colour combinations from one day to the next. This is why I always advise people, if they’re blending around corners then they should do that in one sitting. This means you’re working with exactly the same colours, you’ve got the same palette on your brush – it makes the whole process that much easier.
I didn’t heed my own advice! Mind you, I was working with a lot of colours.
I hadn’t planned it this way, but each side was going to be a different colour, one side would have a mix of greens, yellows, a bit of white and some read – it’s boho furniture remember – whereas the other sides would be finished off in much more vibrant pinks, violets and reds. This was certainly going to be a loud design!
Once I’d got my respective green and pink base coats down it was time to go to work with some of the Posh Chalk Pigments. As I mentioned earlier, the pigments can be watered down to use as a wash but if used as is, they’re perfect for raised stencilling!
I elected for the Aged Wall Paper stencil, which like most of the Posh Chalk Stencils, is a repeating pattern so it can be used multiple times over larger areas, all you have to do is line it up! Simple!
I chose a selection of colours that would both match the base colour as well as tie into the colours on the decoupage, even for boho furniture this was turning into a real mash-up of colours. The more the merrier right?
When stencilling with a repeat pattern you really want to avoid getting a line where one stencil pattern finishes and the other begins To ensure this I overlapped a little whilst also making sure that I started and finished each segment of the stencil in the same colour. If I was blending colours in situ, removed the stencil and went back with a different colour, then the pattern would jar – I mentioned this last week, the eye is drawn to straight lines.
Now, there are (at the time of writing) 18 different colours of Posh Chalk Metallic Pastes but the great thing is, they can be mixed really easily to create different shades and hues – perfect for boho furniture projects like this one.
I found the Violet a little too…well violet so I toned it down with a little of the Red Medium Cadmium and White Titanium as well as creating an orange with the Canary Yellow. This side was boho furniture at it’s finest, some real head-turning colours were going on here. Daphne was beginning to look her eclectic best!
So she’s dressed (just about) but we’ve not even tackled the inside yet – beauty isn’t skin deep remember! Next week we finish off the boho furniture project with some more stencilling and a few surprise touches!
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