Tutorial: Painting Furniture {using a projector}

So my friend brought us this serious clunker of a dresser. Solid, chunky and 80's if I do say so myself. She wanted us to make it purrrty for her impending baby girl to use as a changing table in their nursery!

She had purchased this absolutely adorable bedding for the nursery, and wanted us to coordinate the crib sheet into our design for the changing table. Isn't this bedding absurdly cute?

Image source

The dresser had some funky-weird engraved designs on a couple drawers that needed to be gone... like yesterday.

So after wood-puttying/sanding about 5 times, and lightly sanding the whole dresser and drawers, we primed with Kilz, and painted the whole thing a lovely shade of Krylon Peekaboo Blue. Easy enough, no?

Then, using a photograph of the crib sheet, I cropped it around one of the roses and printed the image blown up to 8.5 x 11, and then traced the flower onto a transparency via Sharpie! Do you see where I'm going with this?

You guessed it. With my handy overhead projector I blasted the flower image asymmetrically onto the dresser (similar to our very own changing table in our twin girls' nursery!). When I had it just where I wanted it, I used a pencil to lightly trace! Or if you're super-human, consider free-handing it and let me know how that works for ya!

Then I got busy painting, using simple Folk Art acrylic paints. Obviously the more complex your design, the more time-consuming and tedious things become. But the outcome is soooooo worth it! No creativity needed! ANYBODY can do this. All you need is a relatively steady hand!

The original hardware wasn't altogether unfortunate, but it was just a little too... brass. Ain't nothin' a little sanding, priming and painting white wouldn't fix! And whatdoyaknow? It looks amazing! I was worried we might need to hunt down some perfect hardware... but NO! Lucky break for sure.

So there you have it! Check out our other projects that we've used the overhead projector for here.