White chair with hand painted detail

While working to make the chair in the photo below a little cuter, I hit a snag. Let me show you what went wrong, and what I did to fix it.

Here it is painted in "Heirloom White" with a little distressing and some hand painted detail on the back.




The bird turned out fine. I did not free-hand this, by the way. It's traced. In fact, one of these days I hope to be able to show you with step-by-step photos how you can do this yourself. But that will be another time.

The leafy twigs... well... there's the snag. In my attempt to make things easier on myself and save a little time, I used a Sharpie marker to draw on the fine lined twig instead of painting it.

I knew I couldn't do a clean job with paint, so I improvised. Bad idea. When I put a clear coat over it to protect the paint, something in the sealer made the Sharpie bleed. Aren't those things supposed to be permanent?

My solution: very fine sand paper. You can barely even tell it got sanded in this photo.

But here you can see the difference in finish. The sealer just kind of absorbed the marker, so all I had to do was sand that layer off and it took the Sharpie with it.

This time, I did it right. Black acrylic paint, fine-tipped paint brush and a damp napkin just in case of mistakes.

See? Not very good with the paint. But that's okay. This is supposed to look hand painted, worn and imperfect, so I left it alone.



Another coat of sealer and it's all done!
The end.