One of the painting techniques that we get asked about the most, is how to blend Fusion Mineral Paint to create that seamless flow from one colour to the next. And one of the most popular looks is an ombré effect, which is the gradual blending of one colour hue to another, usually from light to dark. Today’s tutorial is going to teach you How To Blend Paint To Create An Ombré Effect. 

So today we are going to be showing you how to create an ombré look on an armoire. If you don’t have an armoire but would like to recreate the look on a bookshelf or even a piece of art, you can use the same blending technique.

What you’ll need to blend furniture paint – ombre effect on furniture 

• Fusion Mineral Paint in Little Whale, Laurentien, Azure and Renfrew Blue.
• Paint brushes and tray.
• Water spray bottle and water

Before we get started here are some friendly tips to follow about this specialized paint technique:

1. If this is your first time blending paint, choose colours in the same colour family. Think all reds or all blues. Select colours that can easily transition to the next. As you get more comfortable with blending, you will be able to move to mixing completely different colours side by side (we’ve got that post coming soon!).
2. Practice first on a different surface (not your final piece), such as a piece of scrap wood or a canvas (like we did). This will help you to get the hang of the process before starting your actual furniture piece.
3. Blend, blend and blend some more! Keep blending.
4. If you do not want your paint to drip, if it all if possible, lay the item down horizontally to avoid doing so. Otherwise please just take care with how much water you mist onto the paint. Remember to lightly mist and not over-spray. Over spraying will cause the paint to become too diluted and drip.

See? Practicing beforehand will help you get a feel of what works and what doesn’t.

Ok, let’s get to it! Time to learn how to get an ombre effect by blending furniture paint.

STEP 1 – START PAINTING WITH THE LIGHTEST COLOR, THEN THE NEXT COLOR

Starting at the top, visualize the armoire or the item you are painting into 4 equal parts. Then using the lightest colour, Fusion Little Whale, start to paint the top part and then begin to paint the colour after that, Laurentien. In the section where the 2 colours meet, lightly blend the colours in a crisscross hatch pattern. Do not press too hard with your paintbrush and avoid painting in a straight line. You don’t want the blending to look harsh and painting in a criss cross pattern helps the blended part to look more natural.

As you paint the blended sections, using your spray bottle, lightly mist the blended areas with water.  It will extend the blending time and create this amazing watercolour effect, which just happens to feel extra amazing with the shades of blue!

STEP 2 – PAINT THE OTHER TWO COLORS

Continue to repeat this technique for the rest of the armoire with the remaining colours. So in our case, it was the two darkest colours remaining.

STEP 3- DRYING & CORRECT 

After the application, let your armoire/piece of furniture dry. You may find that you like how the paint dried and leave it as such, but for us, there was a bit of colour variances and splotchiness that we wanted to fix up. So we mixed the two colours for every section we painted and then applied this custom blend to cover the areas we wanted to feel more blended.

So for example, the first colour at the top was Little Whale and the second colour was Laurentien. We mixed them together and then applied this custom blend to the section where they met. This created a new in-between colour that helped the colours flow together more smoothly. Then repeated that process all the way down the armoire.

Just to make it even clearer here is the order of the Fusion Mineral Paint colours on the armoire from top to bottom:

• Little Whale
• Little Whale/Laurentien blend
• Laurentien
• Laurentien/Azure blend
• Azure
• Azure/Renfrew Blue blend
• Renfrew Blue

Using these special blends really created an outstanding ombré effect.

This one definitely takes our breath away!

If you have ever painted anything with an ombré effect, we would love to see it. You are always welcome to share projects in our Paint it Beautiful Facebook group.

This project was commissioned by Fusion Mineral Paint and completed by Mary from Orphans Without Makeup on behalf of Fusion.

PIN IT FOR LATER! “How To Blend Paint To Create An Ombré Effect”