Peeling paint....part deaux

So, we know how bad the first attempt turned out...if you didn't read the post, you can find it here...it was ugly...just ugly...

I may have mentioned a time or two that I am a persistent woman, an Aussie once told me I was "strong willed", and coming from an Aussie, that's somethin'...my mother just called me damned stubborn (or hard headed, they were pretty interchangeable). Admittedly, I may be a bit willful (I can hear my friends laughing all the way over here). I most definitely shall not let paint win, so I had no recourse but to try again. Thus begins the journey to peeled paint...part deaux.

While I am not participating in Lisa's Color Week over on her blog, Curious Girl, Tuesday's color was blue, and, as I was playing with this on Tuesday, I thought I would go with that as the top color. By the way, if you haven't read her blog, hope over there, it is not only delightful to read, it is some of the very best blog candy..it's bright, beautiful, colorful, inspiring and just down right interesting...but I digress...let me get back to the task at hand.

I wanted something sunny in this as well, so I chose yellow for the bottom color. I have to be honest, yellow is not my favorite of the colors. I love how its lemony brilliance brings fun and joy into my world, but I don't like it in HUGE doses (unless it is very specific shades of it), so I tempered it with a bit of a mustardy color and a light brown. Once painted on, I actually let it dry. A bit easier than the last time I tried, it is a bit damp outside, but is not pouring. Then I judiciously applied the petroleum jelly. Not big thick streaks, but this time I used an old, sort of stiff, paint brush to apply random thin layers in not so wide streaks.

The second layer was simple enough, since I wanted to temper the yellow I had used originally and had used a bit of brown for that, brown was a good choice. I painted it on over the dried yellow paint and petroleum jelly. Then, I walked away (you know me and that patience, or lack thereof, thing) to go wash out the brush.

Once that was nice and dry...very thoroughly dry, I added more streaks of petroleum jelly. When I did the second layer of it in the last fiasco, I was very careful to NOT let them overlap often. This time, I didn't worry so much about that. The streaks of it fell where they might, and using the brush to apply the petroleum jelly actually allowed the edges to be somewhat more "feathery", for lack of a better description, that seemed more "natural".



A lovely robin egg blue was painted on top of the brown. I'm not sure if it was the paint, or the brush, or what, but the coverage of blue wasn't as solid as I had expected. I liked the effect, and decided that I'd do a second, very thin, coating with the same blue, and a bit darker blue mottling it. And then....I walked away because the temptation to try to speed up the drying time was almost overwhelming. Honestly, I do need to work on this patience thing.




When it was TOTALLY dry (see how much better I am doing with the patience thingie??), I took a paper towel and rubbed the paint off. Then I took another, and another, and another...and finally, I resorted to an old t-shirt. The "peeling" definitely was not as bad as the first. No huge blotches, and no massive amounts of petroleum jelly left over. But, it took lots more work to remove the paint so I dragged out a secret weapon.


See the little mottled square over in the upper right area? That my friends is a small Formica sample tile. You know, the kind you can find in your local home improvement store. For free...just hanging there, inviting you to take them home to see if you really might like that particular Formica for your counter tops. Not only are they great for that, they make great scrapers for this peeled paint method. They are great little spreaders (think paint, glue, etc.) too, but in this case, it REALLY helped scraping off the paint.


Overall, I saw a great deal of improvement. It still needs to be tweaked a bit, my lines were too straight and too parallel. Old things don't age in straight lines that are parallel. So I know I need to be more random with the petroleum jelly, but this effect is FAR better than the first attempt.

While I was pleased with the progress of my learning I'm not totally satisfied with the piece, so I didn't stop there, after all, what's the fun of art if there isn't any play and experimentation involved? I'll share the rest of what I did to it tomorrow.