I have been coveting some Union Jack trunks sold here in Coco Republic. They retail for $5000. So coveting is where it’s going to stay. Until I decided that I could do something similar myself.
I didn’t want something quite on that scale but I love the look of the distressed flag. So I picked an old, but uninteresting pine box that I had kicking about:
I masked around the top and primed it with a couple of coats of Gesso. I decided to give this another go rather than using primer. I quite like the old wood, so I’m going to start by just painting a flag on the top and leaving the sides.
I decided to paint the flag on freehand. It was too fiddly to mask it out, and I felt like doing some freehand painting. So I drew it out first in pencil.
I mixed up some paint colours that were slightly faded as I didn’t want bright red and blue on here. Raw Umber is the secret to this – add some and your colours will be nicely faded and old-looking.
This still looks far too ‘new’ compared to the coveted trunk, so the next step, once the paint was dry was a good hard sand.
And even after this much sanding, I kept going…. This is the point at which you need to be brave. And it paid off:
It looks wonderfully shabby!
This is where using gesso instead of primer made a difference – the sanding back gives a much better effect on the gesso as it comes off with the grain, leaving a lovely distressed effect.
A fab, beachy, cool storage box. And it was free. Not $5000.
Hiya, great work on the union flag box, its pushed me to get something like this for home.
Dont know if you meant to do it (and i sound condescending by saying this) but the flag is the wrong way up. Just thought i’d point it out.
You’re quite right – I realised once I’d done it that the diagonal stripes aren’t right at all – the wider side kind of revolves, whereas I just did straight lines.
Oops! Ah well – let’s just call it art….?