Creating a professional looking faux woodgrain effect isn't nearly as difficult as you might think. Painting faux wood grain with a standard paintbrush is difficult - that much can't be disputed. However if you look into buying some faux grain tools you can make your life SO much easier. These tools can be used to achieve a faux wood grain design with very little trouble.

You can purchase these tools either online or in a craft store near you - although buying them online does add an extra element of convenience. You'll find that these tools make it very easy for you to put together a wall design that works for you. However, it is not entirely straightforward if you have never done any faux wood painting before so take your time.

The first thing that you need to do before you can start painting the walls is to make sure that they are all clean, newly painted, and sanded down. Preparation is the key! If the walls are rough in any places, you should make sure that you get out your sander and smooth them down. The reason for this is that if the wall is rough to begin with, that may make it difficult to use the wood grain tool.

The color you should use to paint the background is whatever color will work best with the color scheme used in the room. The easiest way to determine which colors you should use is to look at a type of wood that you like. Then you should find which colors are most dominant in that type of wood. There will be a lighter tone, and a darker tone that accentuates the rings in the wood. You should use the lighter tone to paint the background walls. Depending on how dark the wall paint was behind this tone, you may have to give the wall several coats of paint to get the desired effect.

Although you can start painting as soon as you think that the base coat is dry, you should probably wait an entire day to start. That way, you won’t have to worry about ruining the wood grain design by smearing it against the base coat. That's the very last thing you want!

Next, you should take the color you have chosen for your wood grain and paint that down the length of the wall from top to bottom. You should not put a particularly thick layer of this paint onto the wall, however. It is going to be the parts of the wall where the base coat shows through that makes the wall look like it has "grain" to it.

After you paint the wall with the wood grain color, you should go over this wall with cheesecloth. Just rub the cheesecloth down the wall from top to bottom. This should give you the "streaked" finish you need for a proper faux woodgrain to be truly effective. These streaks are going to end up making the wood grain design. It's time now to use your faux woodgrain tools. You should be careful and start from the bottom. Just run the tool over your paint very slowly, and rock it back and forth. You should end up creating a design that looks like real wood grain – complete with knots in the wood!

So as you can see creating impressive faux woodgrain effects really doesn't have to be that hard at all!

Want to add some life to your home? Why not learn more about faux finish woodgrain effects and other interior painting ideas at PaintSplashes?

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