How to Use Rags for Faux Painting : Faux Painting Tips and Techniques

How to Use Rags for Faux Painting : Faux Painting Tips and Techniques
The wetness of the rag is very important in this type of a faux. It’s really important that you know this- that the lighter the texture, the smoother the texture, the somewhat dryer of the rag that needs to be. In other words, if it’s a heavier texture, the rag needs to be a little bit more moist. So by dunking your rag- I keep a bucket nearby- and it’s very important to me to have two rags, or however many people are doing this- one per person or two for yourself, however you want to do that. And also, a clean one. The clean one’s real important because that’s going to help with all your incidents that happen on the floor- drips or you wipe it off your molding, your base boards. So what I do is I’ll dip this in the water, and I’m going to wring it out, because this is a smooth texture. I’m going to wring it out to where it’s almost completely dry. That’s really important, where I don’t have any water just slinging off of this whole thing. After awhile, and you’ll see pretty much off the bat, the rag’s going to get pretty good and dirty from the paint. That’s cool. Even the dirtier the rag, the dirtier the water you’re dipping it into, the better the faux finish. The truth is that water over time will practically do the faux finish for you. We will usually leave the water like it is, at the end of the day if we’re not quite finished, we’ll just throw the rags in the water and let them sit overnight. And by the time we come in the next day, we just wring it out and it’s pretty funky by then with plenty of paint on it and we’ll just commence to fauxing again and we really get some nice effects out of it. And we pretty much keep it that way until we’re finished with the job. Unless the job lasts longer than three or four days, you might want to just clean the water after that because it doesn’t exactly smell so well. So that’s kind of important about the rags. The heavier the texture, a little more moist because you’re going to run out of water in your rag right away. The lighter, you want to keep it somewhat dryer.