Tutorial: Gradient Shading Wood Stain Technique

Three things to be excited about today…

• It’s Friday (nuf said!)
• We’ve randomly chosen the winner of our DIY Headboard Giveaway! (Diane!… who ate apple cinnamon oatmeal, we’ll be in touch with you!!) Also… CANNOT believe there were 492 entries… you guys rock! We’ll most likely be doing another giveaway like this at some point, so don’t be too dismayed if your name isn’t Diane.
• Below is one of my PROUDEST pieces of furniture of all time.

Let’s start with the before picture:

We picked this up at a coworkers garage sale. It looked a lot nicer than this at the time.

But we had painted other pieces ON TOP of it and gotten lots of goobers and nasties and overspray all over it. We didn’t care because we know we were going to have to strip the entire surface anyway.

Stripping is a dirty job. Use protection.

Once my top surface was free and clear of all nasties, I sanded her down with 120 grit, and then again with 220 grit. And then 7 more times with 220 grit. It needed to be SO smooth for what I was about to do with it.

Finally I was ready for the FUN part! After wiping down the surface to get all the sawdust off, I lightly sketched out the outline of a flower. You totally can’t see it in this picture… but you get the point, right?

Then I whipped out my Minwax Ebony and a small paintbrush, and began staining and shading… using the same technique from our previous tutorial

The key is to SCRUB SCRUB SCRUB with a dry cloth to achieve that perfectly blended shade. It’s a lot like drawing with charcoal.

I just worked my way around the flower, occasionally stepping back to decided where I needed to add more stain to get the look I was wanting.

This is FUN, my people. It really is.

I decided to really make the flower pop by staining the rest of the table solid and dark. This next picture was taken before the surrounding stain was wiped off.

At this point, I took a step back, and decided which parts were in a ‘shadow’ and needed to be very VERY dark. The more contrast, the more striking this technique is!

I let that sit for several minutes, and then went back and scrubbed a little off around the edges. And then waited some more. If you’re going to give this technique a try, I highly recommend referencing our more detailed tutorial from our Burnpile Buffet project.

And then I was done. And I feel like a proud mama…

I used a Q-Tip to make those little speckle-y marks on the petals.

I primed and painted the base a glossy black, and the whole thing got several coats of glossy poly. I’m super bummed, because these after pictures didn’t turn out as good as I wanted, because the glossy surface is so reflective and is so hard to capture on film.

And who isn’t a sucker for an incredible before/after picture!!

Have you guys been staining anything lately? Or trying your hand at something unconventional? So long as your not using your Granny’s heirloom antique curio cabinet as your guinea pig, you’ve got nothing to lose! Throw caution to the wind!