How to distress furniture...the easy way!

If you have been following my Pinterest boards recently, you may have noticed all the pins relating to photography. I'm sorry to flood your feed with them :) I'm sort of dabbling in the idea of starting a newborn/baby photography business. I've always been interested in photography and have taken classes in the past and have thought many times of starting up a business, but never have. I think I am finally on the cusp of actually doing it :) Before I do this though, I know how much knowledge and learning needs to play a part. I'm taking more classes and trying to get myself more prepared. We'll see where it goes or if it scares me off! :)

Luckily, I have a ton of props already and my new planked wall in my front room works lovely as a backdrop...and the one in the dining room is wonderful too :) I also have plenty of chairs and fabric to use.  I have this old black chair that I spray painted years ago, and really wanted to change the color.  Once I started taking photos with it though, I realized how much I loved the black. But my style is really soft colors, and black is sadly not one of these. I really wanted it to be a beautiful mint or calming green. My mom gave me that previous chair, so I asked her if she by chance had another one she might be willing to part with and she did! It has been used for painting, had been outside for years, and was most recently used as part of a jungle gym she built for her cat. Since she had another chair to replace that one, she let me have it :) Score!

So, this chair was not pretty. But I didn't need it to be :) I was going to mess it up anyway. First was to take off all the paint drips. The best way I found to do this was with a butter knife.

I left the rest of the white paint on it because I knew it would look perfect with the way I was going to distress it.

Next I primed it and then started spray painting it a beautiful Celery from Krylon. Well...I had about 1/3 of a can...and sadly that wasn't enough :( ....and I couldn't find that color anywhere...anywhere! I found it online finally and I was really close to buying it...really close. It's still sitting in my Amazon shopping cart as we speak :) But I found a close second. Pistachio by Krylon.

I wasn't sure about it at first. It really reminded me of the color of a hospital gown. But I figured I had two options. Try to make this work....or wait a week until I got the shipment from Amazon.

So, if I was going to have to wait anyway, I might as well try making it look not so hospital gowny, right?

The first step was to distress it. I just got some sandpaper and went to town on the edges.

Next was to calm down the hospital green. I did this by white washing it with some chalk paint from UrbanOasisDecor. I got a paper towel damp, dipped the edge in some paint and then started painting the chair with it, making it a little white in some areas but not all.

I was going to use some stain to bring out the wood where I sandpapered, but I really don't like how it spills over onto the paint sometimes and won't come off...or, comes off but not all the way. So, to keep it on the wood and off the paint, I decided to use a furniture pen. I love these things. If I want a quick go to way to distress furniture, this is the method. I just marked the wood and smeared it with my finger a little bit to get rid of the 'marker' looking lines. It brought out the wood perfectly :)

And now it's done! And ready for a sweet little babe :)

The color actually turns out beautiful looking in pictures. Even without all the whitewashing and distressing. But it pops! now that it's refinished :) I think that I'm going to move the Celery color into the 'save for later' part of my Amazon cart because this is totally working for me.

The color of the chair is just what I had envisioned for my photos, I'm glad this hospital gown color worked out lol.

Any photographers out there that have some tips on starting up your own photography business or even just running one? I'd be happy to hear them :)