Question
Can anyone suggest some books that deal with the art of distressing wood?
Forum Responses
(Finishing Forum)
From contributor R:
The best thing you can do is go to antique stores and flea markets and look at the old furniture. Find marks you like and learn to duplicate them. Observe where the distressing occurs and just as important, where there is no distressing. Pick up a couple of small pieces, take them to your shop and try to duplicate them. I also save pieces of scrap wood with real wormholes in them and try to duplicate them in my pieces. The most important thing to remember is that there are no rules. Use whatever works to make the mark you are after. And finally, the best way to age antique pieces is to use many layers of glaze. The more thin layers you add, the more authentic it will look.
I want to put a few feathers in my cap. One designer in particular flies in a crew from Italy to do high-end distressed finishes on kitchen cabinets. All I've seen so far are some samples, and they knock the snot out of anything I've ever seen. I won't have any trouble with the colors, but the distressing itself is phenomenal.
I doubt I'd be able to bribe the crew with some brews, but I'd work until the cows came home to know how the distressing is done.
Go to a furniture retailer which sells mid- to high-end new furniture and see what the big guys are doing to create furniture which sells.
The mindset of the decorating and designing crowd is filled with what's available from furniture stores and so-called design stores. Follow the lead of the big manufacturers and go from there.
Another conclusion would be to use a soldering iron or a wood burning tool to add scratches or dents and gouges to the wood surface either prior or after staining.
The first step in gaining the vision is to simply use your eyes. Look not only at old pieces of furniture, but also at sculpture, pottery and art. Some of the techniques with fancy names would never take place naturally on wood. You have to go outside your medium to find examples of these techniques.
The second step is to use your head. Look very, very closely and, most importantly, analyze what you see. Simplistically, we have only 3 elements that we use in getting to a desired color: the background color of the wood, pigments and dyes. That’s it. Just like a musical chord, every color element that we use is a note. How we layer them on the wood's surface will determine the color "chord” that we see. We use glazes, stain bases, toners, etc as the vehicles to build these layers. Each vehicle imparts a unique signature to the appearance of the color. For instance, a dye used on bare wood will look different than a dye mixed in some lacquer and used as a toner. When you look at color, imagine the layers and the vehicles that were used to achieve it. When specifically looking at distressed finishes, remember you are going to try to recreate finish failure. What would have caused it to look like that in the first place? There are telltale clues everywhere, but all you have to do is see. Once you figure that out, you can usually come up with some simple ways to recreate them.
The third step is practice, practice, practice, or should I say sample, sample, sample. Like riding a bike or being a parent, people can explain it to you all day long; you don’t really understand until you actually do it.
A couple of insights I have discovered along the way… Manipulating color, texture and sheen are often more effective in creating the illusion of age than beating the snot out of the piece. Use at least three colors on the piece. Mother Nature doesn’t stop at a stain and a glaze.
Everyone tries to beat a texture into the wood. In reality there is usually more texture coming out of the wood. Wrinkled finishes, accumulation of crud in the corners, etc. Use gesso, acrylic pastes or even thickened vinyl sealer to build up the surface texture. 3D is the key.
Certain fantasy finishes can only be recreated by using silver leaf or a metallic paint as a base coat. Tortoise shell comes to mind.
Less is more.
I do a lot of hand scraping and planing, along with multiple glazes and finishes. I have found a combination of texture and color have to work hand and hand. I use a lot of deep garnet shellac sealer and wash coats over glazes with a conversion varnish sealer or dull flat top for durability. I then hand wax and buff the piece for a dull and glossy spot effect. Real antiques usually have a nice worn effect that makes the wood glossy only in spots.
Comment from contributor F:
I have done some set construction for movies and music videos and distressed wood has come up a number of times. I was able to get some really great looks on shipping crates that called for a really aged look.
I built the props and then sanded down the areas that would have been handled a lot so that the edges were rounded and some surfaces had dips in them. Next, I used a drill with a light (nylon) sanding wheel (like a metal brush wheel only less aggressive). This brought out the grain very well by taking away the softer layers first and leaving raised grain. It also took a little practice as well.
Once the surface texture was right I painted the wood a light brown color. Once that has dried, I painted it with a darker brown (+30%) and then rubbed the entire surface with a rag, so the darker pains stayed in the cracks. Finally, I rubbed on some wax and buffed it with a car polisher or buffer. This gives you a very realistic and very old wood look.
Recreating age can best be described as placing your piece in the center of a spider web. The warp that goes out are the resources, processes and situational conditions including time and environments that affected the piece. You have to think and plan this "history" out even before you build your piece. Some, you must include in your shop drawings such as cracks in boards that would have occurred at cross grained restraints. Tops with breadboard ends are a good example of this cracking. Notice how the breadboard end no longer matches the width of the table boards proper. Wood was not kiln dried then and the moisture content was higher. The cells were not killed by heat, or the wood cells or anything still living within it. Try working a piece of air dried riven or quarter sawn piece of lumber with hand tools to experience what the builder did.
