DO YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO GIVE THIS ANTIQUE EFFECT TO A FRAME? THIS IS YOUR CHANCE!

This frame was sleeping for many years on the highest shelf at my dad’s workshop. It’s made from gypsum and wood, and when I found it, it was a terrible mess. Painted gold of course, looking like s**t. The framed artwork was not really my taste (a farm man with a bunch of cows around in a green field), so I tore it out without further thought.

The steps

Clean the frame really really well. Especially if there is a lot of detail in the embossing, you could use the air spray we clean the keyboard with.

Choose the color you like and start painting it. You could use plastic colors, spray paints, oil based colors. I used enamel paint which was not such a good idea (you’ll see later on why). Wait for the paint to dry very well.

After that, it’s time to use my favorite product, glaze. Glaze is what will highlight the details, leaving your basic color intact. For this specific surface I used 5 tablespoons of glaze which was mixed with half a tablespoon of black tempera. You can mix the glaze with any water based color you wish. (That’s what’s perfect about glaze! You can make it any color you like! )

Then you give the frame one coat of glaze. Make sure the glaze reaches the details.

Leave it for about ten minutes to settle and then with a dump piece of fabric, start taking off very gently. You don’t want to remove the whole the whole thing, you want it to remain in the details. But then again you can actually do whatever you want depending on the shade you want to give to your object. (I don’t have a picture of this stage because my hands were dipped in paint and couldn’t grab the camera!)

For example, I like the great antithesis between black and white. Here’s the result. As you can see there is a little of gold left.. It’s because I used enamel paint and when I started removing the glaze, some of the paint was removed as well.

I hanged it on the wall 🙂

Now in general…

Tip 1: Glaze is great for these kinds of projects because it has a very long drying time, hours really. So it gives you the possibility to form it as you wish.

Tip 2: It’s a bit expensive (in Greece at least), something like 15 euro/kilo, but in general you don’t use lots of it, so it lasts for a lot of time.

That’s it!