Painting the Garden Shed Bench

Today I painted the bench in the sunny garden shed. The bench needs to have lindseed oil applied to it to keep it from getting water damage so I added pigment to the oil to be applied to parts of it. It will need quite a few more coats of oil but they should be able to be plain without pigment from here on out.


For the leaf I used a synthetic green pigment Emerald Earth had been given a large bag of. It was somewhat different to work with, it seemed to stay in solution better and was much brighter. I only really did one coat on the leaf. I did a little touch up work after the first coat had dried though. The vein in the middle of the leaf is a combination of the green and the red from the other side, then some parts of it have more green on top of that. It looks a lot like I just didn't paint it, the color turned out so much the same as the bench.


For the sunflower petals I used yellow ocher, an earth pigment, it was really hard to get it strong enough to overcome the brown plaster. The second coat really helped.


The center of the sunflower was painted with a combination of red iron oxide and a different yellow ocher, and I added small flakes of mica to it so in the sun it should sparkle. By the time I was done the sun was not on that side any more. I will have to check it out some morning.


I tried out putting some of the red on the petals, based on a sunflower I had looked at, but it was mainly just to see how it would look. I did it before I had applied the second coat of yellow. A bit of the red did show through I may try to add a bit more but I don't want very much.


That last picture of the flower the paint is still wet, it won't look like that after it is dried. The second coat dried a lot slower than the first. It never looked wet like that when I painted the first coat.


I also applied the first coat of oil to the whole bench. It was a pain to paint under it and get into the plaster between the rock foundation. The first coat really took a lot of oil. The bench just sucked it in. Following coats should take less oil until it doesn't want any more, then it is done.