Desk Makeover With Mineral Fusion Paint and Ink Transfer

Dysko7710
by Dysko7710
9 Materials
2 Days
Medium
My husband's cousin graciously gave us a beautiful desk and desk chair to use for my oldest daughter's bedroom. It was in great shape, and while it was originally a beautiful pale lime green color, it had taken some abuse with paint and nail polish and needed a makeover. Luckily, I had just received two containers of mineral fusion paint from Hometalk in two great colors. So, this project was going to cost me 0 dollars! This is a project my daughter and I did together, which made it extra fun!

Editor's note: All materials for this great project are available below.
This is a before of the desk and below is a before of the chair. Both needed to be redone.
For this project, we used Mineral Fusion Paint in two colors, Tuscan Orange and Azure Blue. I got both of these bottles of paint from right here on Hometalk!! Thank you Hometalk!
We lightly sanded down the desk, but only to make the surface even, since it had some paint and nail polish sploshes on it. Then we cleaned it well with just a multipurpose cleaner. We then got to painting! Mineral Fusion paint is a primer, paint and sealer all in one, so it adheres well and is very durable. I already had the sand paper and paint brushes. We laid down plastic (which I already had), in the garage to paint the desk. We painted it two tone, doing the orange as our main color on the desk, but painting parts of the desk in the blue. So we used painter's tape (already on hand), to mark off areas on the desk so we could do the two tone painting.
You can see here we painted the top orange, and I taped off some of the 'knob' parts of the legs so that I could paint those blue after the orange was done.
Here, my daughter is taping off the outsides of the drawers so those can be painted blue, as well, after the orange dries.
Here is the desk with the two tone on the legs and the drawers are almost done. As you can see, there are places where the tape peeled off some of the orange paint. After painting everything and letting it dry, we did have to go back over areas with very small brushes and do some touch up work.
We did the same process with the chair. We used the blue as the main color on the chair and accented with the orange.
We wanted to put some kind of images onto the desk and chair, and contemplated stencils (which we didn't have, and were too hard to make in my opinion), and hand painting something. In the end, we decided to do an ink transfer method that sounded fun. We found images online we wanted to use and put them into a Word document. I then cut a piece of wax paper and taped it to a piece of cardstock. I printed the images onto the wax paper on my inkjet printer. The ink is very wet so don't touch it or it will smear!
Take the wax paper off of the cardstock carefully and cut around the image to make the piece of wax paper smaller and easier to work with. Then lay the wet image carefully onto the surface where you want it and gently rub over it with a credit card (or Giant Eagle advantage card like I did lol). Peel back the wax paper and the image will transfer to your surface. It will not be as dark as the original, it has a more faded/vintage look, but that is what we wanted.
We did this cool steampunk/gear image on all four corners of the top of the desk.
We painted the knobs blue and transferred an ink image onto all of the draw knobs, as well.
We also put an image on the back of the chair.
Here is the desk all finished and in my daughter's room. This is where all of the homework magic happens now! My daughter did just as much work on this as I did, she is an artsy 13 year old and it was a fun mother/daughter project!


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  • Ila Holloway Ila Holloway on Sep 16, 2017

    why the fusion mineral paint???

    what inspired you?

  • Kaye Kaye on Sep 16, 2017

    Did you have to put anything over the transfers to keep them from smearing? Thanks


    Great job.

  • Linda Linda on Sep 17, 2017

    Where can I find Mineral Fusion in various colors...mostly blues and yellows? I did not find them on Amazon. Thank you.

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