The Painted Kitchen: Over 60 quick and easy ways to transform your kitchen cupboards

In The Painted Kitchen, Henny Donovan demonstrates how with some paint and basic tools anyone can transform a drab, dated kitchen to the most welcoming room in the house. Add new doorknobs, maybe some gold leaf or colored wax for embellishment, and the heart of the home is once again stylish and a pleasure to use.

Organized by color -- naturals and off-whites, yellows, reds, blues, greens, black and gray -- and complete with comprehensive step-by-step instructions and photographs, The Painted Kitchen offers the principles of color, choosing color, and working with man-made finishes. Full of inspiration and eminently practical, this book shows how to:

• prepare old or damaged natural and manmade surfaces for painting
• work with laminates, raw and painted wood, melamine, and fiberboard
• choose colors that work with the room's lighting
• co-ordinating colors to create ambience
• choose the right faux finish for your cupboards
• create the most popular faux effects: colorwashing, distressing, glazing, dragging, combing, stippling, sponging, rag-rolling, spattering, craquelure, crackle glazing, relief stenciling, textured combing, stamping, and decoupage
• use luxurious embellishments: gold leaf, colored waxes, metallic paints, molding and polishing
• work with exciting products: venetian plaster, texture paints, liming wax, graphite varnish.
• mix universal tints

More than 16 innovative projects, each with four variations, offer choices for everyone, including:

• blue-and-white Portuguese-style folk art
• vinegar-glaze fingerprinting
• birch wood graining with faux ebony and ivory inlay
• terra cotta polished plaster with copper squares
• liming over a marquetry-style woodwash
• vine-leaf stipple, gingham checks, duck-egg speckle
• distressed paintwork and hand-painted script.

An extensive list of North American sources rounds out this excellent how-to reference.

Henny Donovan has over 18 years of professional experience in art education and interior design. She is the Creative and Business Development Manager for Jocasta Innes's Paint Magic Ltd., for which she writes the curriculum for 22 interior decoration courses. She lives in London, England.