FARRAGOZ Notebook: How to add an old-world paint finish to a new sailboat?

Wednesday 19 March 2014

How to add an old-world paint finish to a new sailboat?

I am so thrilled with my $2 charity shop find of last week! I instantly knew I had to have it.

Okay, perhaps it didn't look quite like this...

... but more like this. It was clearly mass produced and bore a "Made In China" sticker underneath to prove it. I know this kind of thing that has been painted and then sanded in a few places, appeals to a lot of people who like "paint techniques", but this is not the look and finish I go for. It looks too new.

A quick search on the internet provided me with this inspirational photo. This is what I wanted my sailboat to look like. Really old and neglected. I was very anxious to change this boat into something looking authentically old with lots of patina.

HOW I DID THIS

I quickly sanded the entire boat, leaving the surface less smooth for my home made wood stain to penetrate. It then needed a resist before I painted my first coat.

{See MATERIAL LIST at the bottom of this post}

I used masking tape to mask the area that was to stay white and applied black oil paint from the Icon Project of the Patina PROJECTS Course.

It needed some extra detail, so I marked out a "window" with a pencil and drilled an indent on both sides. Next I painted some details in different colours, distressed and polished it.

The wooden sails were dead wrong. I found the perfect piece of old threadbare linen between my vintage fabrics. This I cut to size and hand sewed it to make the new sails.

After attaching them to the mast, they still looked too new, so I smeared them with wet teabags and left them to dry. They turned out nice and blotchy, looking just like old weathered sails.