I am in the process of helping my parents update their dining room. We added this new buffet to the room, that I found at a discount retail chain. It 's perfect for the room, but when I got it, it had a big blemish in the wood on the front left drawer, as you can somewhat see below.
Initially, I thought that I could fix the blemish with stain, and I tried to sand and refinish the spot to blend it into the rest of the piece. It didn't look good, and was still very noticeable. Using the book Paint Effects Masterclass by Sacha Cohen, I decided to try a faux finish on the buffet to mask the problem. The book is filled with pages of how to paint various stone finishes and wood grain looks. I wanted to choose a finish that was fairly easy to complete and did not require precise painting skills. I settled on a Malachite stone pattern. Malachite is a green mineral stone with circular and ribbon-like patterning. 
Since green stone would have looked a little out of place in the dining room, I decided to translate the pattern to varying shades of dark brown.
To begin the project, I taped off the cabinet and primed and painted the section that I wanted to faux with a latex cream colored enamel.
Next, using artist's acrylic tube paints from the art supply store, I squeezed out two different shades of dark brown into separate piles on my palette. Using two different brushes, I painted patches of the two browns over my base coat. I worked in about a five inch square at a time, so that my paint would not dry before I got to faux it. To create the malachite circular ribbon pattern I simply tore up pieces of index cards and dragged them over the wet brown paint in a circular, squiggly motion, removing some of the brown paint, revealing the pattern. The book explains how to do the finish in more detail, and shows detailed pictures of how to drag the index card over the paint. The finished look is not perfect, but natural stone patterns are irregular anyway. There is a definite hand painted look to the cabinet, but overall I like how it turned out. After it dried, I brushed an artists gloss varnish over the faux finish to shine it up, and make it look more like the actual malachite stone. The project took me about 2 hours to complete and cost less than $10 for the small tubes of paint and varnish.
Next, using artist's acrylic tube paints from the art supply store, I squeezed out two different shades of dark brown into separate piles on my palette. Using two different brushes, I painted patches of the two browns over my base coat. I worked in about a five inch square at a time, so that my paint would not dry before I got to faux it. To create the malachite circular ribbon pattern I simply tore up pieces of index cards and dragged them over the wet brown paint in a circular, squiggly motion, removing some of the brown paint, revealing the pattern. The book explains how to do the finish in more detail, and shows detailed pictures of how to drag the index card over the paint. The finished look is not perfect, but natural stone patterns are irregular anyway. There is a definite hand painted look to the cabinet, but overall I like how it turned out. After it dried, I brushed an artists gloss varnish over the faux finish to shine it up, and make it look more like the actual malachite stone. The project took me about 2 hours to complete and cost less than $10 for the small tubes of paint and varnish.
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