Faux Painting Finish "Ragging With Paper Towels"

by Karen
(Westland, MI)

This is the finish on the upper walls of my main bathroom. It was a happy mistake!

This bathroom originally had wallpaper on it when we moved in. I’m not a wallpaper person so I removed it and painted the walls white. Of course, this was too boring, so one weekend when my husband was away I decided to paint.

My original plan was to sponge blue on the walls, so I went to the store, bought blue paint and sponged away. Didn’t like it. Went back to the store and bought the maize color. Painted white over the blue sponge (thankfully I only did one small wall) and tried sponging on the maize. Didn’t like that either!

So I painted white over the maize sponging and started over... again. I decided to just paint the walls solid maize so I would at least have some color in there. (Are you counting? I painted that wall 5 times before I got what I wanted!)

As soon as I started I realized that fuzz from the roller was stuck in the paint on the wall. I grabbed some paper towels to try to dab them off and, lo and behold! The paper towels left a pattern similar to an aged wall in Tuscany. I loved it!

I painted small sections, crumpled paper towels, dabbed them randomly, and then went on to the next section making sure I had a wet edge.

The hardest part of this entire project was deciding the color and waiting for the paint to dry in between coats until I settled on the final color.

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