Speckled Paint Effects by Accident

I purchased some "wood" frames from the dollar store a while back with the intention of hanging them on our bedroom wall with family pictures inside. The wood it appears is actually particle board (which I guess is technically a wood product) covered in a wood-grain-printed plasticy coating. I decided to try to spray paint them.

I have grand ideas about our bedroom that may very well not come to fruition for some time yet, but I have selected a kind of color pallet. I decided to paint the frames a light blue and got the only bottle of light blue spray paint at home depot. It was a pretty color (which I neglected to photograph, but just picture the frame to the left as bright light blue and you will have it), but it was too saturated for what I was going for. I decided to try white washing over it to mute it.

I got some white paint that had been sitting in the cellar of our last apartment for who knows how long and watered it down (It was acrylic)I painted the frames with a thin coat so that you could see the blue through it. Though I did like the effect, it was not right for my room visions. I may do this again somewhere else. Perhaps it would work with a different base color in my kitchen some day. I also needed to work harder on getting it all to look right in the corners, a battle I decided not to fight for this picture because I was going to cover it all up anyway. In any case, I decided to try something else.

If I had read the labels before trying this, I never would have tired it, but then, I never could have painted the frames the way I did. I mixed my blue spray paint with some of my watered-down white paint. That is to say, I sprayed a fair amount of spray paint directly into a paper cup and poured the white paint into the cup immediately following and stired the whole thing up. So, my white paint, as I have already discussed, is water based. My spray paint, on the other hand, is oil based. In other words, no, they did not mix. 

But it is what they did that is why I wrote this. I got speckled and somewhat textured paint. I have seen speckled paint in the store, so this isn't earth shattering news, but I still think it is pretty cool. Since the spray paint speckles sort of float to the top, I had to add more spray paint part way through to keep my speckalage even on all frames, but I was pretty pleased with the results.

At first, I wasn't sure if this effect fit with my vision either, but I made it work in my head. Since the grand visions for our room will probably not be realized until we actually own a house, I figure having it work in my head is good enough for dollar store frames for now.








I think it is kind of cool. What do you think?