A Tall Frenchman in Green

This dapper dresser was in dire need of some love when I picked him up. 

He belonged to a young girl who had a fascination with graffiti, named Brittany.  I know this, because she practiced those graffiti skills all over this poor dresser. My powers of deduction tell me Brittany liked The Back Street Boys, was in love with a boy named Brandon, and the stickers plastered all over the side indicate she enjoyed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 Needless to say, a lot of prep work was involved in making a blank canvas and undoing some of Brittany’s, (ahem), art skills. 

 I had mentioned in my previous post that I wanted to paint in green.  I custom mixed up this colour and admit that I tweaked it a bit with each additional coat to get a shade I was happy with. It was a bit of an evolving process to get the tone just right (not too bright, not too rustic) It reminds me a little bit of ASCP 'Florence'.

I topped with a touch of black glaze and did a light distressing because I felt it needed to be ‘aged’ up just a touch.

Here is a glimpse of just some of the creative flair young Brittany possessed.

Midcentury Modern set In Gray

I picked up this set as an entire bedset for FREE off a kind gentleman who was moving out of province: 2 nightstands, tallboy and longboy.  Unfortunately the long boy was in such bad structural condition that I donated it to goodwill.  It was bowed and sagging in the middle and all the drawers banged into each other.  Too bad, because it was pretty cool looking.  I have worked on pieces before with bad bones, and it always drives me bonkers in the end. It drives Mr. Chuckles bonkers too as he is the one who ends up helping me fix them!

But alas, I rescued the other three pieces.  I went for deep charcoal as my base.  I knew I wanted to do a fun little detail, but I didn't have much time to get these guys done before I go away on holidays, so I needed to keep it simple.

 I love striping on MCM pieces, I think it really suits the trendiness of them and compliments their clean lines.  I was inspired by some pieces in blogland that had large and small stripes side-by-side.  I thought this looked cool, yet still pretty simple, so I opted for that.

 I custom mixed up the 'white' - it is actually pure white ASCP with a tiny bit of the charcoal grey mixed in, just to take the edge of the brilliance a bit.  I used painters tape to do the stripes, doing a coat of my base colour first (charcoal), and then doing two coats of the white (helps prevent bleed through to do the basecoat colour first).  Little tip for ya!

This set has pretty cool wood pulls.  When I have all 3 dressers lined up together for a picture they remind me of Batman!  Something about the way the curve.  They are almost a bit Gothic looking.

That's all for me today.  It has a busy and super-duper hot week.  Its amazing the paint even dried on these bad-boys! Our humidex was consistently above 40 celcius.