How To: Paint Techniques

In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how to do a stippling effect which is ideal and very cheap to do on kitchen cupboards, bedroom cupboards, on furniture, anything like that. So, first of all, what you do is prime your surface and undercoat it with some paint. Make sure it's water based paint such as vinyl silk or water based eggshell because you need to be able to have that on your surface in order to use the glaze. Once you have prepared your surface, what you need to do is mix up some of this glaze which you can buy from DIY shops or wholesale decorators, or places like that. This is a rather large one. But you can buy a smaller one-litre one for roughly about 12 pounds, which will do the whole lot of your bedroom cupboards or kitchen cupboards. And you only need a small amount of time. So, you simply open it and pour a small into a paint capsule, like so, and then what you can do is add a little bit of water this will stop it drying very quickly because it will dry quite quickly. Just mix in like that, like so, and if it looks a bit watery, you can always add a little more glaze. I'm going to add some colour to this. Now I've got some paints here, these are artists paints, you can actually use artists paints or you can use normal domestic paints. So, let's take a little bit of the blue, what we simply do is to mix it through, like so, until you get the colour you want. Now, you can have it fairly light or you can have it darkened. It actually depends on your own taste and the more paint you add, the darker will it become. So, again, a normal standard paint brush, just put it on your paint brush, like so. And this is as if you are painting a can or something. Just apply it like so. And if you get little pieces of dust like that ,just pick off with your finger and then continue, all the way along, okay. Make sure you spread the whole lot of the glaze on the surface. If you don't, you will end up with patchy areas. Now, don't worry too much if it looks little bit heavy on one end. What you simply do then is to stipple it and this is going to give you the actual stippling effect. These are special brushes called stippling brushes which probably cost you about 20 pounds. But they are well worth the money because they give you a lovely effect and last for a long time and if they are looked after. And again, all you do is stipple along. And as you can see, I've got a little heel appearing here, just peel off like so, and here too. The glaze does attract bits of dust so be aware of that. It's so easy to use that you can just go over it again. So, if you make a mistake, don't worry or if you just want a practice, it's fine. So, again, just stipple like that all the way across and down. Now, stumble glaze dries very quickly, so after an hour, if you feel it's not dark enough, you can go over it again and you can go over it with different colours. If you want to put maybe a darker blue, or maybe a little bit of red or something, just the same method, same principle, you just have to mix up some scumble glaze with a different colour and apply it in the same way. And that's how you can cheer up cupboards in your house.