Decorating With Bamboo Mats, or Are They?

by Dianna Wood

3 Materials

$30

6 Hours

Easy

When what you see is really not what you think you are seeing. These are hand painted linen mat boards. They were hand painted to give the illusion of bamboo. Anyone can do this once they know how. Read on for the details!

We just moved from California to North Carolina and we resolved to re-purpose all that we could as opposed to spending a bunch of money to decorate our new place. I wanted to frame my bedroom word art with bamboo mats in order to tie in the mixed woods and leather bedroom furniture. All I had was three large white frames with off white linen mat boards. Totally not going to work.

I had searched all morning at thrift stores for some bamboo placements that I could cut up and use on top of the linen mat board. They were no where to be found. Wanting to finish the bedroom before night, I decided to see if I could paint the linen to look like bamboo. I am pleased with the result and found this to be quite easy. After studying a our large bamboo window covering, I went to work.

Using painters tape, I masked off the areas.

Using the Faber-Castell art pen I colored in the exposed areas. I then took a black art pen and highlighted both the top and bottom of the color areas. I finished that off by highlighting the center of each strip with a warm scarlet red. I then gently removed to painters tape to exposed the unpainted areas.

Now for the fun part. Using a clear ruler, I ran tiny strips of both a reddish orange followed by a dark brown.

The picture above shows the first pass of strips using the reddish brown. I followed that up with the dark brown. Once all strips were painted, I used a black artist pen to make the vertical "woven threads" alternating the lines for each strip. Once all the strips and threads where painted on, I rubbed the entire mat with a coat of furniture "restoration" stain in Walnut. Just had it sitting around and needed to blend in a bit more warmth. It worked wonderfully. Spray painted the white frames and what started out like this....