Sunday, September 11, 2011

Peacock Table Tutorial

Yesterday I posted about my table redo and now it is time to share how I did it. 

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I printed a peacock feather I found online because I wanted to try to do an acrylic paint transfer that I read about here

I have painted furniture many times using craft acrylic paints.  I have always liked them because they are cheap and easy to work with and come in many many colors.  I am a green fan and I really like Americana’s slate green.  It is kind of a blue green, but with a little glaze the green comes out more. 

I knew it would be good to use the acrylic paint because I needed to use the same acrylic paint for my transfer.  After I sanded, painted and distressed the table I painted a layer of acrylic paint onto the copy of the feather and placed it onto the table.

I worked the bubbles out with a food scrapper.

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After it dried for just a little bit, I sprayed the paper with water and peeled it away.  The very bottom peeled away completely.  I think because the paint had dried too much before I applied it to the table. 

This is what it looked like after the paper was peeled. 

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I really didn’t know what to do because this wasn’t the look I was going for.  I am not sure if I did something wrong or this is suppose to happen or it is because I had to paint past those fine little feather hairs and it left the paper where the paint was.   Anyway, I had to sand it regardless so I sanded carefully to see what would happen. 

After I sanded it looked like this.

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So it is there, but faint.  At first I was going to just call it distressed and leave it as is ( I even glazed it and gave it a coat of polyacrylic) , but I thought I would try to paint over the feather and try to bring back some of the vibrancy of the colors. 

I sat on my front porch and enjoyed the beautiful day while painting.

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Here’s what it looked like while I was working on it.

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You can see how painting it helped to bring out the colors.  It was tedious, but kind of relaxing too.

I protected the feather paint with more polyacrylic and I ended up with a fun table.

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If you try the transfer I would love to hear about it.

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