Faux Painting Finish "Ragging With Paper Towels"

by Karen
(Westland, MI)

Faux Aged Finish on the Walls Achieved by Ragging

This is the finish on the upper walls of my main bathroom. It was a happy mistake!

This bathroom originally had wallpaper on it when we moved in. I’m not a wallpaper person so I removed it and painted the walls white. Of course, this was too boring, so one weekend when my husband was away I decided to paint.

My original plan was to sponge blue on the walls, so I went to the store, bought blue paint and sponged away. Didn’t like it. Went back to the store and bought the maize. Painted white over the blue sponge (thankfully I only did one small wall) and tried sponging on the maize. Didn’t like that either!

I painted white over the maize sponging and started over. I decided to just paint the walls solid maize so I would at least have some color in there. (Are you counting? I painted that wall 5 times before I got what I wanted!)

As soon as I started I realized that fuzz from the roller was stuck in the paint on the wall. I grabbed some paper towels to try to dab them off and, lo and behold! the paper towels left a pattern similar to an aged wall in Tuscany. I loved it!

I painted small sections, crumpled paper towels, dabbed them randomly, and then went on to the next section making sure I had a wet edge. The hardest part of this entire project was deciding the color and waiting for the paint to dry in between coats until I decided the final color.

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