Metallic Warm Silver with Black Glaze Furniture Finish

I’m pretty excited to share this one with you today. This is Mr. Tester’s first refinish and doesn’t he look handsome?! As you may recall, I am starting a bedroom makeover and will be giving all of my furniture a total makeover with either paint or stain or some other furniture refinishing treatment. This inexpensive yard sale nightstand will be my tester piece to try out the finishes and see what I like most.

It’s a great little piece and just needed to be wiped down for the most part. There are a few imperfections or knicks, but I decided to go ahead and leave those alone since this piece isn’t going to go into my bedroom and is just to see what a final piece of furniture will look like.

Since the final metallic paint finish I would be using is a rather thin sort of finish I wanted to make sure I gave myself a good base color to start with. When I picked up my Bulls Eye Primer, I did go ahead and have it tinted to a sort of warm champagne color. The color was called Ancient Scroll and it’s from Valspar.

It’s a little tough to tell here because the clouds kept going in front of the sun making it shaded, but the primed piece took on a cool creamy grey finish. A perfect base color to go under the warm silver.

Now for the fun part. I wanted to do some sort of metallic finish on this piece and since I’m sticking to creams and silvers in my bedroom, I decided on a silver finish. Spray paint was not what I wanted to do and I definitely did not want a high mirrored finish. I wanted something classic in feel and that would look well when I apply a black glaze to it to give it sort of an old world feel. Someone had recommended I give the Modern Masters metallic paints a try but after checking Home Depot and Lowes, neither carried it. Apparently it’s a specialty paint.

I did check Amazon however, and found an entire line of Modern Masters Metallic paints in a variety of silver shades including platinum silver, pewter, warm silver and a handful of other metallic silver tones. I didn’t want a straight up silver, and in the end I decided to go with the warm silver because I wanted to go for an almost champagne silver tone and warm silver seemed the closest to what I was after.

It does go on fairly thin and brush strokes were a slight pain to handle. I started off with a bristle brush and it just wasn’t the way to go. Then I tried a roller, and again, it wasn’t working the way I wanted to. Lastly I tried just a plain foam sponge brush and it did the trick. The above picture is after one coat using the bristle brush just so you can see the brush lines I was talking about. I forgot to take a picture with the second coat using the foam brush but you’ll see it in the pictures below and it’s much smoother!

After the paint was dry, I moved onto the black glaze. This is just the Valspar clear glaze tinted black from Lowes. There isn’t any perfect way to apply this either, anyone can handle it. I simply dip my foam brush into the glaze and slap it onto the piece making sure I really push it into any crevices or carved areas, because that’s where the black will really show off well. After applying the glaze, I almost immediately wipe it away with a clean white cloth. *Sorry for the change in colors here, in the sun the color looks more bronzish, but in the shade it was definitely more silver.

After wiping away the glaze away you can start to really see the detail in the metal accent pieces. However, I don’t just wipe the accent pieces, I glaze the entire furniture piece, wiping in the direction of the grain to give it a natural feel to the finish.

Above is the final product and I’m not sure if you can tell the true color in the picture. The day would turn from cloudy to sunny in minutes and it changed the way the paint looked in an instant…which I actually find kind of interesting and would definitely happen in my bedroom with windows.

For those of you who checked out my Pinterest board in the previous post on my bedroom makeover, what do you think of this finish for the concept and feel for what I’m going after? I haven’t quite made the decision myself, but I will say that the warm silver is quite a bit warmer than I originally anticipated. It’s almost more of a champagne with a metallic feel.

Attention! I am no longer writing new articles here at PaintYourFurniture.com. All of my articles and content have been moved to my new blog DIYHomeInterior.com which includes furniture painting plus TONS of other home decor DIY projects and ideas. You can find this article there as well so click here to go to DIYHomeInterior.com