Chalk Paint Chair

This is a little bit of a "before" and "after" using Annie Sloan Chalk paint. I am a relative new beginner to this little joy, which has many enthusiastic users and now I understand why. I have painted a fair bit of furniture before but this chalk paint means no preparation and can be used in different ways to achieve different techniques. In this example, I used a chair from a charity shop which had thick layers of old gloss paint on it. With other paints, I would have sanded the white paint first to prepare a painting surface, but with this chalk paint there is no need!

So, above is the charity shop chair with its not-very-attractive thick gloss paint. The only prep I did was to wipe the chair with a clean cloth and then I just started painting. I used Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in "English Yellow'. I'm a bit obsessed with yellow at the moment. I painted a couple of layers of this stuff all over the chair, as Annie Sloan says in one of her YouTube demos the trick is to "just get on with it", so that's what I did!

This is the chair with its good coating of yellow paint - as you can see, there are brush strokes and texture in the paint. I painted quickly and in different directions to intentionally leave brush strokes in the paint. This is where the dark wax will sit to give a distressed effect.

Next, I applied Annie Sloan Clear Wax all over the chair, I used a lint-free cloth (my budget hasn't stretched to a £35 wax brush just yet) and again applied this fairly quickly, rubbing a layer of the wax all over. Next, I brushed in the Dark Wax, using circular movements and only working on a small section of the chair at a time. Excess dark wax was then wiped off with a cloth leaving it sitting in the textures of paint. Once completed, I used sandpaper in some areas to distress further and the whole chair was given a final layer of clear wax, to give it a smoother feel and durable finish.