Creative Ways to Paint Children’s Furniture

 

If you’ve been following along with me the last couple of week’s, you may remember that my daughter and I are in the middle of revamping her bedroom.  My girl is about to be 10 years old in a few weeks and she has wasted no time in taking the lead designer role for her new chic-preppy-meets Cirque Du Soliel (that’s the only way I can describe where she’s going with this) room! Today, I wanted to share some tips for painting children’s furniture that we have done so far in this space.

One thing is crystal clear, my girl LOVES big bold layered patterns!  I’m in heaven because I think my girl is going to inspire me out of my neutral calm box that I’ve been in for a few years.  I’m also in heaven because she wants all of her furniture painted in bold patterns.  That’s all I needed to hear from her and before she could finish her thoughts, I was pulling out the painter’s tape and we went to town!

We still have a lot more pieces to paint but I thought I would show you what we have done so far.  There are so many creative (and easy) ways to paint children’s furniture and the best part is that you just use furniture pieces that they already have.  If you’re looking for a fun way to update a child’s space, hopefully our projects will give you some fun ideas!

So far, we have painted two pieces; her dresser and nightstand.  Both pieces came from Pottery Barn Kids about 7 years ago.  Both pieces were from the Logan collection and this is what they looked like before we painted them:

 

 

and here is what the pieces looked like after we finished painting them:

 

 

 

 

Pretty big difference, huh?! I just cannot get over those gorgeous colors and finish!

We are really excited about how fun the pieces turned out and they really took us very little time!  As long as you have great paint and great painter’s tape, the fun pattern possibilities are endless!

 

 

Of course, the paint can make or break a painted piece of furniture.  For these two projects, I used Velvet Finishes paint because the brush marks disappear, the paint is highly pigmented with color and the paint is thinner than thick traditional paints that build up too much on a piece.  I’m obsessed with Velvet Finishes and have been painting like a mad woman with it ever since I found out about it!

 

 

For these two pieces, I used the Velvet Finishes colors “Glamorous” (the hot pink) and then I mixed together two-parts “Boheme” (turquoise) to one part “Enchanting” (green) to get the beautiful sea foam blue color.  For the tape, I always use ScotchBlue Painter’s Tape with Edge-Lock because it never fails me.  Time after time, if I make sure the tape is down good, I will always get perfect crisp lines without fail.

 

 

As far as pattern possibilities go, there are endless ways that you can create a pattern.  Because my daughter’s bedding has smaller patterns, we are balancing the room with larger patterns on the furniture so the patterns off set each other.  Looking at bedding is the best place to start for ideas.  If you have larger patterns in the bedding, think about narrow stripes, narrow plaid, etc.. If you have smaller patterns in the bedding, wide stripes, wide chevron and wide plaid are some fun patterns to balance.

You can see below in this picture how the bedding has a small pattern and how the larger wide stripe pattern on the nightstand perfectly balances the two bold patterns:

 

Both patterns that we did were probably the easiest of all patterns to do.  We did both of these pieces in just a few hours.  For the nightstand, you can see below just how easy this pattern is to do.  The piece was painted white all over first and then after it dried, we made our stripes with the tape:

 

we also saved time by only doing the pattern on the front of both pieces!

For the big dresser, we had to work in sections and painted the upper chevron first (we used the center of the dresser as our tape guide) and then after it dried, we painted the bottom chevron (you can’t do both at the same time).  After both top and bottom dried, we then painted the white part:

 

Because I used the Velvet Finishes paint, I didn’t prime either piece. But because the pieces had that heavy duty Pottery Barn finish, I lightly sanded the piece with my fine grit sanding sponge.  I then used the Velvet Finishes “Ready” Product recommended to prepare a piece for paint.  A few days after both pieces dried, I tried scratching the paint and it didn’t budge! So nice to not have to prime!

I hope there is an idea here or two to get you thinking about fun furniture paint possibilities.  Really, this is not just for kids either!  I can see doing both of these patterns in other areas in our home with some of the other colors.  Imaging that wide stripe in a black or a fun emerald green. By the way, if you want to learn more about the new Velvet Finishes paint that I am obsessed with, you can read my Velvet Finishes tutorial here.

Ok, back to the painting I go friends!  Thanks so much for stopping by today and if you happened to miss last week’s Paint It Monday, you can get to that post by clicking the image below:

Cheers!

Cyndy