ANTIQUE SILVER PAINT FINISH

This was a project for a friend to refinish a cedar chest.  The corners had been damaged by some furry friends and re-staining wasn’t really an option.  We decided to try an antique paint finish.  The original plan was do have it more “antiqued” looking, but we stayed with the shiny silver paint and went with just antiquing the grooved areas.  The final finish is silver spray paint and the grooves were antiqued with a 50/50 mixture of black and silver acrylic craft paint. 

The corners were repaired with many layers of wood filler. This is what they started out looking like…

 

I applied layers of wood filler over the course of a week; I would do a couple coats a day, letting each coat dry and then adding another layer, and some sanding to shape the wood filler to the original form of the corners as best as I could. They are not perfect, but here is what I was able to do...

 

The time consuming part was the prep work.  Building up the corners with wood filler and sanding the whole chest with all of the nooks and crannies, including sanding the inside cedar lining to reactivate it (even though I was not paining this part).

I also added some picture frame molding to the back of the piece to add some interest.

I primed the whole piece with spray primer.

Then I spray painted it silver.

 

Then the antiquing with an artist brush with the 50/50 black and silver acrylic paint mixture.

 

 

 

 

And finally coating it with a satin spray varnish.