How to Use Faux Finishing Tools and Products

LEARNING HOW to use a few of the tools and products com-monly employed by professional faux finishers will make your painting much easier. If you run across an instruction in the demonstrations that you don’t understand, come back to these pages. With a little hands-on practice, you’ll soon master the techniques the professionals use and you’ll have a lot more fun in the process!

CHIP BRUSHES

1. Use a 4-inch (10cm) double-wide chip brush to pull a strié pattern in a wet glaze.

2. Use a 2-inch (5cm) chip brush to pounce your glaze evenly against a woodwork trim or ceiling lines throughout the room.

3. A 3-inch (7.6cm) chip brush is great for cross-hatching a design in two colors, such as magenta and lavender as shown here applied on a Woody Yellow background.

WHIZZ ROLLERS

1. Use the Fab roller cover on a Whizz Roller to apply texture to a surface. The longer fibers help to apply a lot of product quickly.

2. Use the Velour roller cover with its shorter nap to apply size. Wash the size out of the cover as soon as possible when you’re finished or you’ll have a sticky roller.

3. You can use two Whizz Rollers at the same time to apply two different colors of glazes—a faster way to apply glazes if you’re working on a large surface area.

SPONGE ROLLER

1. This 9-inch (23cm) sponge roller is deeply incised with random low and high places. It uses a lot of product, so place a good amount of paint in a 5-gallon bucket with a 5-gallon grid screen to roll your roller onto, or use a large paint pan.

2. Roll the texture on but don’t go over the area you just applied—keep moving to a clean area.

3. This is how the texture looks when applied with a sponge roller. It’s so much easier and faster than dabbing it on one spot at a time with a natural sea sponge!

JAPAN SCRAPERS

1. Load just the top edge of the Japan scraper with your product.

2. The advantage of a Japan scraper is that the blade is very flexible and allows you to remove the maximum amount of material from the surface.

3. To apply texture, your fingers must be on the side edges of the blade, so the blade can lay almost totally flat to the surface as you apply the material.

STAINLESS STEEL TROWEL

1. Butter the flat blade of the stainless steel trowel with a thin amount of product. Here I’m using an orange color of LusterStone called “Cantaloupe,” but this works on any dimensional textured plaster such as Venetian plaster and drywall mud.

2. Hold the blade at a 45º angle…

3. …and scrape off as much product as possible with a firm pressure.

4. As you scrape, you can see that the product gathers on the edge that is touching the surface.

5. With the excess material on your blade, lay the blade flat and apply that material to continue the skim coat process.

6. Take your blade back up to the 45º degree angle for the removal. The higher the angle of your blade to the surface, the more material you can remove. To add material to the surface, you want your blade almost flat and parallel to the surface.

WUNDA SIZE & METALLIC FOILS

1. Use a Whizz roller with a Velour cover to apply Wunda Size. Let it tack up for a minimum of 15-20 minutes.

2. Transfer a metallic gold foil using a Robert Rubber.

3. Other metallic foil colors you can use are Celadon Green and Bronze.

LUSTERSTONE

1. Load a Whizz roller (with a Fab cover) with a LusterStone color and apply to your surface. LusterStone’s metallic sheen is very subtle—good for a surface where you don’t want something as shiny as a metallic paint or foil.

2. Troweling on the LusterStone will show a bit more of the metallic sheen.

3. Backfill with another color of LusterStone for more depth and interest. Here I’m using “Cantaloupe.” Use colors that fit your décor.

REACTIVE PAINTS

1. Reactive paints are real metal paints that will patina when hit with a reactive agent. This shows a copper finish that’s had a patina agent applied to produce the distinctive greenish color of verdigris.

2. This is a real rust finish. An activator was applied over a real steel paint to produce actual rust.

3. This example shows a LusterStone background with a rust modello.