Have you ever walked down the paint aisle at your hardware store and searched for THE PERFECT color to match your cat’s sweater…or a tiny flower on a piece of wall paper? You peruse hundreds of shades of green but never truly find the one that works. Color matches aren’t always accurate and it seems inevitable you’ll probably just have to get Fluffy a new sweater. But have you ever thought of custom mixing your own color? The task seems more daunting than it really is. In this post you’ll see how easy it was to play with milk paint and get the perfect custom color.
Surprisingly, the color I wanted to match in this photo was actually the stems from my artificial Billy Ball flowers. I really liked the soft shade of sage it was and felt it complimented the warmer greens in the map as well. So I used some leftover Old Barn Milk Paint I had to play around with finding the perfect color. A good place to start is the green base.
I had about 3/4 cup of OBMP “Fiddle Leaf” left over from a previous project. I knew this would be a good starting point for my green color, so I added about 1/2 a cup of OBMP in “Sweet Cream.” I could immediately see the color coming together. It was still a bit too green for me so I kept adding water and a teaspoon of Sweet Cream at a time until the color was perfect!
The next step was to test the color on a scrap piece of wood with the finish I had planned to seal it with. Doing this will give you the TRUE color of milk paint when dried, cured and sealed. While milk paint can range in colors it’s in powder form and mixed, the only way to know if your color match is spot on is to paint a similar piece of wood and put a topcoat over it.
After a three coats of paint, I’m left with this wonderfully chippy custom sage color on this file cabinet. The beauty of milk paint is that you can’t really control how the paint will chip. You can add bonding agent to avoid chipping all together, but for this, I wanted something with character and age. Adding some flat black Magnolia pulls just added a bit of industrial flare to this piece. It’s a mix of so many styles!
You definitely can’t forget about the interior. When drawers are in bad shape (cosmetically) the best way to hide and dress them up is with a drawer liner. This was a $2.99 find from Home Goods and compliments the pulls and the color perfectly!
Have you mixed a custom color? I’d love to hear about your experience with it in the comments below!
Leave a Reply