Black Hand Painted French Drawers

January 31, 2013

Black Hand Painted French Drawers

I picked up this antique set of drawers not too long ago from one of my first estates sales out in Cusseta, AL. To say that this piece was in a bit of a wreck is actually being kind. I always like pieces that have been slapped with a heavy piece of gag-me green linoleum that I have to scrap and pull off the top. When I mean pull off, I mean stand on the top of the dresser and pull OFF!

The drawers were all wobbly and the veneer was a mess as well, but I looked at it as an awesome challenge.

My husband thought I was totally out of my bloody mind!

Heck! It was only $17.00, I wasn't out that much if it all was a bust!

The first task was to remove all the peeling veneer after killing my back pulling off linoleum. WHO in their ~~completely whack out~~ right mind would E-ver cover the top of a solid wood piece with crappy 1960-ish linoleum???? If that wasn't hard enough, I had to chisel the veneer off the top and the front of the drawers.

Once I got a rhythm going, it became pretty easy though.

But it does give your biceps and triceps a good workout!

I must say that taking the veneer off the top of the drawers was great because it exposed a great set of wood planks with really cool wormholes in it.

Repairs like securing wobbly drawers were done as well. The *bones* of the dresser were solid though!

Once that *job* was completed, I gave her two coats of ASCP in Graphite.

Big difference already!

I left some of the veneer on the drawers and painted them the same colors I was preparing for the French ad I was hand painting on the lower two drawers.

I painted the "parchment paper" part of the ad first. I used a combination of Coco and Old White to achieve the look instead of having one solid color as the background.

Then I drew the ad on top of the background using a watercolor pencil in the colors I needed the paint to be.

All that was left was painting the drawing using paint pens:

I also decided to draw a little accent on the top of the drawers that matched the scrollwork from the ad itself.

Once painted, I literally used 4 coats of wax on this because I'm using it as a TV stand in the family room and it's going to ~~get banged up~~ see a lot of action in there. Three coats of clear and one coat of dark wax, with a nice buffing between each, should do it. Only light distressing with a fine sanding block was used though.