Gorgeous Faux Wood Paint: The Smart Way to Learn

Let’s go back in time to 1850. Imagine you’re a professional painter/decorator, and a wealthy clients asks you to make his plaster columns look like Oak. 

– I’ve seen it in France and it looks amazing.

– Okay. Did you shoot some pics w/your Android device?

Do you saddle up your horse and trot down to the local book store for some faux finishing books, hoping they’d include faux wood paint technique?

Bad news; the books didn’t exist yet and we barely had electric lighting, let alone the web. 

In those days, the best painters were also decorators who could do various finishes and applications including rag and sponge work, plaster textures and much more.

I have a painting book from the late 1800’s that includes formulas for mixing your own lead oxide paints.

Yikes! Furthermore, if you wanted to survive, you had to be willing to experiment and innovate.

When the finisher wanted to learn a new finish, there was only one thing he could do.

How they learned

Very few books, no web and no color photo’s. How did our mid nineteenth century decorator learn a new faux wood paint finish?

He went to the furniture makers shop or some public building that had well crafted tables or cabinets.

He took notes, sketched various details and aspects he found intriguing… then went back to the studio and started painting. 

If he was lucky, he could afford to buy some real wood; sand, oil and finish it and then take his time studying it.

Or maybe a shop owner or public official would allow him to set up an easel near a particularly gorgeous piece.

How we learn faux wood paint today

This is where it gets interesting to me. You’d think that, with such easy access to photo’s of real wood, those writing books, making dvd’s and teaching workshops would be using lots of real wood to teach.

Not so. In fact, quite rare.

Virtually all wood graining methods teach from images of painted wood. This often results in bad wood grain. 

I set out to change that. That’s why I provide access to high resolution images of real wood for each wood grain type I teach.

And that’s why I teach you to see and recreate the most attractive aspects of real wood.

I take that one step further in the Master Course by showing you how to build your own images library and learn to duplicate any wood from images, using acrylic paint.

Start creating great faux wood paint sooner than later

Another unique feature of the Perfect Wood Grain Courses is that I wanted to be sure that you could create realistic and impressive faux wood pretty much right away.

In other words, I wanted to minimize the learning curve so you can start working on projects asap.

Here’s how this works: Each wood grain course starts with simple, easy to paint, basic grain and then progresses to more advanced techniques like heart grain, curly figure, knots and cracks.

The best part of this is that the basic level grain you’ll be learning looks amazing! I worked very hard to set up the courses this way so you’ll get impressive results early on.

Less frustration, more results

Maybe you remember starting to learn something and getting frustrated because your results weren’t very satisfying. Music is a good one for this. It can take weeks or months of learning guitar or piano before any actual songs get played.

I wanted to avoid that kind of frustration.

This is important not just because you’ll feel totally excited about painting wood grain, but also, if you’re a professional, you can start showing samples of great wood grain to clients sooner rather than later.

Or if you’re just learning one wood type, you can get started on your project right away and avoid leaving your wood work, doors, cabinets or auto interior unpainted.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to working with you on your wood grain projects.