Painted & Aged Wooden Articulated Modeling Hands
Can I please have a show of hands from those that like these hands! Cheesy? I had a handful working on this project line. (crickets) Okay, I give up. It was a lot of work getting these hands to look the way I wanted but the work was definitely worth the reward.
I've got big plans for really jazzing up my booth spaces at Timeline Antiques (Shreveport, LA). I've seen people use retail mannequin hands before to hold things, but I wanted to go the articulated route so they could be more industrious. I just wish I had made more!
I started with a batch of Annie Sloan chalk paint in a darker shade of brown after mixing a few colors together and adding some crush walnut shell for some darker pigment in the mix.
After a few coats of the dark brown base layer, I gave each hand a few coats of different Annie Sloan chalk paint color.
Once I had a good, solid coat on each hand, I went to town hand distressing each one with a damp 3M scrubbing pad. That's the tricky part getting it down to only the levels you want and stopping. When you wipe away the milky paint that you've rubbed off, you see that you've actually gone a little further than you thought. The key is to distress your projects in places that would normally have wear and tear. That always gives you the look of authenticity.
The last step is the most fun painting and jabbing the dark wax from Annie Sloan all over it and then rubbing away the high spots and leaving exactly what you want behind to display some old grit and dirty crevices.
