Maestro en pintura de interiores El arte de los retoques

I'm Chris and Dajo, a painter here on Paint Life TV. Today I'm going to be talking about the art of touch-ups. This is something that takes some time and practice, but touching up right in the center of a wall can be difficult and frustrating. I'm going to give you some tips and tricks to make this successful for you. Recently, someone came into our Paint Life Supply Co. store and was having a lot of frustration with touching up the center of walls. Through my questioning, the client realized they didn't have the original paint. They went to Home Depot and bought a paint they didn't know the original sheen of and were just doing a color match. Now, if you ever try to match the color of a product from one company and use a different product, you're never going to get the exact color and you're never going to get the exact sheen. So your touch-ups are always going to be noticeable. The touch-ups the client was trying to do were removing photos, trying to get the house ready to sell. You'll have what we call "Halloween" around the photos, and it's kind of like dust buildup, or discoloration. The light coming in and all that, but there are these rings where the photos were. They're taking the nails out, sparring them, and trying to touch that up, and this can be extremely difficult if you don't have the original paint. Never think you're going to do touch-ups and have any kind of success if you don't have the original paint or go to a paint store and just do a computer color match. Now, what paint stores usually do, like in their home improvement stores, Home Depot, Lowe's, and things like that, is take a sample of the paint, just take a color photograph of it using a colorist's eye. They're just going to mix it right up, and it's going to be kind of close. It's never going to be exact. What you have to do is adjust it with the human eye from there. But even the best color matchers will never get an exact match. Now, even though it's inside a house, you have windows that are letting light, sunlight, the rays, into the house, so you're definitely going to have some loss of brightness over time. And you're going to have color fading. Time also plays a role, so the longer the time period, the more difficult the touch-ups are going to be. So I don't think you're going to be able to get an exact match if the paint job has been in the way for like 10 years and you're trying to do touch- ups in the middle of the wall. Another thing I want to talk about is using the right tools when it comes to doing touch-ups. Now, one thing you don't want to do unless you 're rolling entire walls is this: if you have the original paints, you have the original color and sheen. It's much faster. If I have multiple touch-ups all over all these walls, just to re-roll, re-roll an entire wall—that's what I usually do when I go to a job where someone just wants touch-ups—I'm not going to try to touch up in the middle of the wall because that's extremely, extremely difficult. I'm going to repaint the entire wall. I only have to get so close to the ceiling. I only have to get so close to any kind of molding or baseboards. Typically, if you're using a good quality roller, you're not going to have any stippling. I'm not trying to move super fast; I can roll an entire wall without masking the... I paint without masking the ceiling or doing any kind of masking when I do touch-ups in the center of the wall. I like to use a Premier Hampton brush. This is a 100% nylon, high-neck brush. It's a DuPont filament brush; the filaments are extremely soft, and I only use this type of brush for touch-ups. I like a 2-inch angled sash brush for touch-ups, or even smaller, but this one here is my touch-up brush. You only have this wall. This house has been painted once. The walls usually don't have much paint, and often if it's, let's say, like an eggshell sheen or a satin sheen, it's extremely dry. When you're going to do a touch-up, you're building up more paint on top of that wall, and what you're going to do is create a nice, shiny spot because you're building up the sheen on that wall. So it's kind of a very difficult scenario, so you don't want to just roll a heavy coat of paint on that surface. If I have a gallon of paint, I'm going to pour some paint into a touch-up bucket or a small paint cup and add a little water. In that paint, I'm going to thin it a little bit, probably about 5%. What it does is help reduce the gloss and reduce the buildup of shine on top of the gloss when you're doing touch-ups. So you'll have more success doing touch-ups in the middle of the wall if the walls have been painted multiple times because they won't be what we consider dry. They'll have a nice, even sheen, and it's less likely to have gloss build-up in the spots where you're doing touch-ups. But it's still important to reduce the paint, you know, about 5%. If you're just touching up small spots in corners, like little nicks and dents, don't just take and seal a lot of paint in that corner. Small nicks and dents, you can use your artist brushes and just touch up the nick or dent, especially, you know, if we're talking about doors and trim. So I'm going to do some touch-ups right here, and this is the original paint. It's really critical that you stir or mix your paint if you're trying to do touch-ups. This isn't stirred, mixed, or agitated. You're going to have problems with the touch-ups. So I'm going to make sure you stir, make sure you stir, make sure you mix this really well. So now I'm going to walk you around and show you some scenarios and show you how I'm going to do touch-ups because this is really important that you see how it's actually done so you'll have some success. We have some marks here on this wall, and I'm going to use my 2-inch Hampton brush here. And one thing I want to tell you is what you don't want to do is use a wet brush. I'm going to start with a dry brush, and we're going to do these touch-ups. The other thing is I'm going to be using the original paint. I have a bucket. The original paint was in a small quart here, and I'm just going to put this inside my bucket because I don't want to carry that quart around. I like to keep it in a bucket. If it spills, it's inside the two-gallon bucket, and I'm not going to create a mess or a disaster. Now, to do this touch-up here, what I don't want to do is— this is one of the things I see a lot of DIYers do when they run into problems—they're going to Take a 4-inch roller or take a brush and just brush a lot of paint over this stain. A four-inch roller is going to create a stripe across here. Putting a lot of paint on is going to create a buildup of shine and a big stain here. What I'm going to do is just dab my paint onto my brush. I'm going to put a little bit of paint on the end of my brush here and just dab this paint over that mark here. And then I'm just going to lighten it a little bit. That's how I'm going to do my touch-ups. I have a mark here. I'm just going to dab a little bit of paint over that, and I don't need a lot of paint. I'm going to blot this stain here a little bit. There's the mark. I'm just going to dab there just like that. You do n't have to put a lot of paint on to cover this touch-up here. So I'm going to dab a little bit of paint, just a little bit of paint. You can see there's a little bit of paint on the brush. There's kind of a mark here. There's a little mark here. Now, this little mark here is a little mark. I just need a little bit of paint on the end of my brush here. I'm going to touch it up just like this. If you apply a big layer of paint in your brushstroke, you'll have thick edges, and those edges will look really bad. So again, it's a dry brush, just a little bit of paint there. So we don't have a lot of gloss buildup. Okay, so I have an area here. We have a hole that was plugged in the wall, and one of the things I see inexperienced people do is plug a hole, take a flexible knife, and just run a bit of filler through it. The filler will end up filling in the texture around the hole, and then you'll end up with a nice flat spot. What you should normally do is take a bit of filler, fill it in with your finger, and then clean up the excess from around the texture so the texture doesn't get filled in. Now, once it's dry, I'm going to take my brush, just a little bit of paint on the end of my brush, and all I'm going to do is dab it over this area here and touch it up. So I don't want to take it and put a big brushstroke here; I'm just going to dab it outwards, like this. This is it. What we would call dry blending around that point. Now that point is all touched up here. I'm going to let it dry really well. We have another mark here. We have a little dent in a corner, a slightly different color in this corner here. So we don't want to get paint in the corner. We have a great, good texture here. You could take something like a scraper, a buffing knife, or a double-edged knife. And you can easily just scrape that down and flatten it. And now I'm going to touch up all around that place. So we get rid of that. So I'm just going to smear my brush there, make it nice and dry, and I'm just going to smear around that. All this. Here there was a chair or something [Music] like that, and then this corner. Here I'm just going to take the corner of my brush and just smear right in the corner. And there was some paint chipped off because it was kind of like a chip, and if you just scrape your brush there, that's going to fill it in really well. Now I'm going to smear out right here, and you can just feather dry if needed. Right here I feathered Alo, dry and everything's retouched, so there you have it. Some tips and tricks for retouching. If you have any questions or comments about retouching, leave them in the comments section. If you liked the video, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, we really appreciate it, it helps us keep making these videos, and we'll see you next time here on Paint Life.