How to Paint Faux Driftwood

Here’s a super quick tutorial how to paint faux driftwood, like I did on this dresser top.

I’m Liz and I own a DIY shop called Frame and Frills. I stock the full Fusion Mineral Paint line along with decoupage, stencils and other DIY products to redo your furniture with. Getting to redo a piece of furniture with these amazing products is such a fun part of my ‘job’. I love it!

I just redid this vintage dresser in yellow and grey, taking color cues from the sepia floral decoupage paper I put on the inset door panels, and wanted a bit of a weathered contrast for the top. A super simple, (and quick!) treatment of faux driftwood totally done with paint was the answer.

The best part about this easy faux driftwood treatment is that if you don’t like it, or need to adjust it a bit, you can just repaint over it lickety-split!

I’ll have a ‘shopping list’ toward the end of this post with links to my shop for each ingredient I used for painting the faux driftwood top.

To start with I painted a coat of Hazelwood color and let it dry.

Next, I added a few lines of Hazelwood and Ash, working on about a 4-6 inch strip at a time.

This isn’t the finished layer, but helps give a little more depth to the finished layer.

After that layer dried, it was time for the final layer.

I started with a few dribbles of Chocolate color…

Then added the Ash and Hazelwood, all wet into wet, just sorta painting a sort of striping, in a not too stripey kind of way.

One huge tip… Before you start, be sure you pour the paint you’ll be using into separate trays to take from. Don’t be tempted to dip directly from your pint of paint! Your brush will have inadvertently touched some of the other wet color on the surface and will contaminate the whole pint of paint…

A little water…

Using a mister bottle, I quickly misted the top before any of the 3 colors of paint set up.

This is what the colors, all very wet and not blended at all, looked like.

Time to blend…

Using basically no pressure, just the weight of the brush, I pulled it from one end of the top all the way off the other end. Because the paint is super wet with the additional mist of water, this is super easy to blend it.

Here’s another tips… Don’t over blend it or it will look more like faux mud instead of faux driftwood. If this happens, don’t panic. just let it dry and try it again. That’s the beauty of this paint, it’s easy to just paint over if something needs adjusting.

Because it was sooo wet from the mist of water, I sped up the drying with the hairdryer. I don’t like that much water soaking into wood and chancing it warping it.

That could be the final step, however I wanted just a little bit of soft luster for the finish, so the next day I poured on a little hemp oil and lightly wet sanded using the ultra fine sanding pad with it, then wiped all the excess hemp oil off. (hemp oil takes 30 days to cure)

The finished look is a dark faux driftwood. This same effect could be done using lighter colors, like Lamp White, Little Lamb and Algonquin, for an overall light bleached wood look.

So what do you think?

Now that you know how easy it is to create a faux driftwood look, do you think you might try it?

Below is the shopping list for the paint colors I used for this faux driftwood dresser top. This dresser is available for sale at a local boutique ‘Covet’, (until it is sold that is).

The products I used for this painted faux driftwood finish are available in my shop online or in person:

• FMP ‘Hazelwood’
• FMP ‘Ash’
• FMP ‘Chocolate’
• One Series Paint Brush
• Hemp Oil
• Ultra Fine Sanding Pad

Have questions? Please contact me, I’d love to help you be successful with your project!