How to Paint Shabby Chic Florals on Furniture

Hello Porch Fans! Today's post is about how to paint pretty little shabby chic roses onto wood furniture. First of all: Disclaimer! I really had no idea how to do this, so I turned to my trusty how-to guide (AKA Google) and tried to find a "how-to" guide to painting shabby chic flowers on furniture. There's a lot of pretty stuff out there, but not a whole lot of "how-to's". That's when I decided to wing it myself and see what happened.


So, don't consider this a one-and-only-way kind of tutorial. It's more of a guide on how you could, maybe, sort of go about painting shabby chic florals.

Step 1: You need a shabby piece of furniture. This table started life as my computer desk. (Actually, it started as a bad Craigslist purchase that fell apart before we even got it into our van. Like, literally FELL APART in the guy's driveway. Hubby was NOT happy. But he fixed it. I love that man.) It was that golden color of wood that some people like, but personally is not my favorite. I shabbied it up with paint and sanding and love.

Step 1 1/2: So, as I dragged my furniture out onto my Porch (a process I am VERY familiar with). I looked around for floral inspiration and found it in full-bloom. Punny!

Step 2: Once your furniture is prepped, you can begin to paint your flowers. Ha ha! No, not really. Not even close.

You need to gather supplies:

• Tape Measure
• Pencil
• Acrylic Paints in the colors you want
• Jar of water
• Paper Towel
• Brushes (small and large)
• Sanding Block

I also chose a pic from the Internet as a kind of basic idea of what I wanted. I'm not good on the fly. I need some kind of reference, even a basic one will do.

 

Step 3: You need a shape to serve as the background for your floral. I chose a circle, because it's what I had on hand, and by on hand, I mean it was a pizza pan on top of my fridge. I measured to find the center of my table, plopped my pizza pan down and traced it out.

Step 4: Next, I lightly brushed cream-colored paint in my circle and tried to fade it toward the edge to hide the pencil mark and make a kind of blurry line between the cream and the blue of the table.

























After that, I penciled what I call Smilies and Frownies all around the edge of the circle. You can see them in the pic.

Step 5: I chose an earthy brown to paint over the smilies and frownies. Then I added little "leaf" shapes on the tips of my smilies and frownies. I filled in more leaves and added some curlie Qs or whatever looked right. This was a trial and error kind of process till I got the look I wanted. After I was finished with the Smiley Frownies I realized they were awfully dark, so I went over them with some watered-down cream paint, just to mute the color a little.

Step 6: This is the step where I make a big fail. I decide to try to pencil in my flowers before painting them. Not only are my freehand drawing skills spectacularly awful, but I realized after painting a few leaves that the pencil shows right through the paint. I tried to erase the pencil marks, another massive fail. They just smeared, and I scratched up my table a little. No big, I like scratched up tables, but I had to hide those pencil marks, so I painted over them with the cream paint, which brings us to...

FAIL.

Step 7: Painting your flowers!
So, since I had no pencil marks to guide me, I really had to wing this part. I wish I could give you a Happy Trees guide to painting roses, but I can't. I just started with dark pink blobs that were the centers of my roses. Then I added some light pink blobs as petals. I used water and cream paint to blend these until they started to look rose-ish. Again, I know that's not very helpful, but it's the best I got for ya. I did the same thing with leaves, making vague "fern" shapes, starting with the tip and zig-zagging once side of the leaf, then the other, adding a "stem" with a quick swipe of the brush down the center of each leaf. I added little curlie-Qs here, too, to fill in the blank spaces and round out the design.

 

Step 8: When I was done, it was kind of pretty, but obviously not pro. I remedied this by using watered-down cream paint to dull the extra-bright green and pink parts of the painting. When it was dry, I used a "dry brush" technique over it, which means I dipped a large paint brush (like for painting wall trim) in cream paint and dried it off on a paper towel. Then I lightly swept it across the painting, letting the texture of the table grab it.



 For the final touch, I went back and sanded here and there when all was dry. For my first attempt at floral painting, I don't think it's too shabby. ;)