Create a Crackle Finish on Wood

A crackle finish on a project is something that comes with time, or something that you can do to a project right away. I've got an example of it here on this raised panel door. The panel itself is just painted hunter green. Here on the frame, I've done a crackle finish there that then kind of accentuates the solid green in the middle. So let me show you what I did to achieve that crackle finish, the key to this whole thing is hide glue, that's what's going to make everything happen.

Got some boards set up. What you want to do is work with contrasting colors. And you're going to start by getting one color down on your board. So in this case, I'm going to replicate what I did on that door, I'm working with green and white. The white goes on first, like I said, the key to this process is hide glue.

Our next step is going to be to brush hide glue over the white paint seems a little weird but it works really, really well. So I'm just going to squeeze this out. And then spread it uniformly over that painted surface. The next step is watching glue dry. It can take that hide glue as long as 12 hours to completely cure before we can do the painting step.

Because we don't want this clip to be 12 hours long, I'm going to set that one aside and I'm going to go to this one, which I had previously done the white paint, and the hide glue on, so this one is completely cured. Now we go to our contrasting color, and here's the key to this is, don't overwork it. Because, we don't want to let our brushstrokes keep overlapping and overlapping, or you may not get the crackle finish that you're trying to get. It's kind of weird because normally when you put paint on, what you're trying to do is get this nice uniform coat and it's just inherent with a crackle finish, that it ain't gonna happen because it's gonna crackle. So you want, I just did it right there.

It's hard to stop yourself. You want to go back and keep touching up the spots where it's starting to crackle over the hide glue. Look right here on this front corner, see the spiderwebs forming already? And it's just seconds since that paint went on. Let's give that green paint just a couple minutes to dry and we'll come back and have a look at how it crackles.

In real time, it's been about three minutes and this is the result that we have so far. And as that paint continues to dry some more, that crackle effect will also continue to get deeper and deeper and deeper. Let me show you another board I've got that I worked on earlier because you can mess with this a little bit and it's worth experimenting. When you look at this one, there's kind of a line down the center here where the crackle on this side is different from the crackle on this side. So the other variable that you can mess with is, diluting the hide glue.

This hide glue is water soluble. So you can dilute it up to 50% in order to get this process to work. On this board, my right side is diluted 50%. The left side was put on with the hide glue at full strength. So you can see that diluting the glue or not, also affects the way the finish is gonna look when it crackles out on you.

So this is pretty cool. It's a little bit more art than science, but if you like the look of this crackled finish it's definitely worth messing with. And like I said, hide glue is the answer to making this work on your projects.