About
Turn a piece of linoleum into a colorful floorcloth.
For this project I used an old piece of linoleum, approximately 2' x 3'. You'll also need some water-based primer, acrylic paints, and polyurethane sealer.
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Step 1Take your piece of linoleum and apply a couple of coats of water-based primer to the underside.
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Step 2Draw your pattern. If you'd like the pattern for the strawberries, let me know & I'll email it to you.
Basecoat the berries with medium red. I used Ceramcoat's Tomato Spice.
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Step 3Next, paint the berry leaves with a dark green.
Then add a darker red to shade the strawberries.
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Step 4Apply the dark red on the 'outside' of the top strawberry and along the curves.
Add some dark red underneath the green leaves too.
Any place you add dark red will add a'shaded'effect.
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Step 5Apply highlighting in White to the full parts of the berries and along the other edge of the 'top' strawberry.
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Step 6Cover the entire berries with the basecoat color - Tomato Spice. At first it will seem like you're covering the shading & highlighting, but as it dries, you'll see the lights and darks peeking thru.
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Step 7With a liner brush, make little curved strokes with Green paint to look like the seeds. Follow the curves of the berry - on the left side make left-sided curves; on the right, make right-sided curves. At the bottom of the berry, make the seeds smaller.
Go back over the Green with a lighter green to make the seeds stand out visually.
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Step 8When the paint is thoroughly dry, score the berries and leaves with an Exacto knife. Then take a larger utility knife to cut fully thru all the layers of the linoleum.
Finally, apply 2-3 coats of polyurethane. If you want to use your floorcloth outside, use a urethane with UV protection to avoid fading.
That's it! You can clean your floorcloth with gentle dish soap and a soft rag and it should last for years.
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