This last week my buddy Mark at HB Painting called me up with a few questions about glazing a chair he had just gotten in from a client. I have been friends with Mark for about three years now and we have helped each other out with many different projects.
Mark has a shop in St. Louis Park where he pre-finishes and re-finishes cabinets, outdoor furniture, random stuff for painters and more. Mark also does a lot of electrostatic painting (a metal painting application) as well. Mark hasn’t done much distressing or glazing though, which is why he gave me a call.
When Mark showed me the pictures of his project, I thought that looks to fun to pass up.
All of the upholstery had already been removed from the chair and Mark had prepped the springs as well as primed and sprayed the chair with one coat of oil based Satin Impervo from Benjamin Moore. When I got there he was 100% ready to start the glazing.
Mark had a sample piece from his designer client that they wanted the chair to resemble so we played around with a few different glazes, and a few different levels of dillution of the glaze before we felt we had the color just right. We chose to work with Van Dyke Brown which is an Alkyd glaze from Sherwin Williams. Just a note, for a project of this size 2 ounces is literally enough. A gallon of glaze lasts a LONG time!
The next step we had to figure out was what technique was going to best match what his client was looking for. After studying his piece for a while we decided that simple is best and went with a very easy wipe off technique.
What We Did:
- First we decided on a flow pattern for the chair. If you do different parts of the chair in the wrong order, your finish will suffer and you will get frustrated.
- We generously applied the glaze to one area at a time and allowed roughly 1 minute for the glaze to sit.
- Glaze was then wiped off until and worked into the piece until the glaze looked smooth and natural in the finish. If there are drag marks or bunches of glaze, it often times looks like it was put there on purpose. Even though it was, our goal is to make this glaze look as natural as possible.
- After the glazing was completed I added some cross thatching to the piece to look like scratch marks that had caught dirt over the years.
- Last was a few specks of glaze to match the sample (I don’t like speckling!).
That was really all there was to it. This piece was relatively simple, yet still a lot of fun. The only step left was for Mark to shoot the chair with a coat of One Hour Varnish from Hirshfields (Best Varnish on the Planet!).
Below is a Gallery of Photos I Took While Working With Mark:
