Day 3, Day 4: Wood Grain

For the wood grain training, we were given an image with several grains to reference and were tasked with matching the base color, grain color, and finish color. After mixing our grain color, we added a measure of gloss to make the paint more workable. When painting the base coat for wood grain, the brush strokes should run the same direction as the finished product to stay consistent. You can see how even though I only used the base color, there's still streaks that emulate basic grain.

The grain technique is accomplished by painting on the grain pattern, then lightly brushing over the paint with a single stroke. To avoid stray marks, the brush should be "cleaned" after each stroke. You can see where I've cleaned off excess paint by wiping my brush down on the table cover. I found the best way for me to achieve the desired effect was to paint on the grain lines heavily, then stroke over them before repeating the process. I did this to avoid shadow marks where the dry brush picked up too much of the paint. This is one of the textures I've really enjoyed doing, but I've been switching off between techniques pretty regularly to keep fresh eyes on my projects, so we'll come back to this one.