Painting bark beetle plaster - all ways

Gusevsky Andrey Anatolyevich

Decorative plaster painting Bark beetle on the balcony

Bark beetle is the most popular decorative plaster coating for facades. And not only for them: it is often used as wall decoration and inside residential and public buildings.

This popularity is primarily due to the simplicity and speed of application, the need for special skills to create coverage. But there is one difficult point in this matter regarding how to paint the bark beetle plaster.

Staining difficulties

The texture of this decorative plaster two-layer: during the alignment process, solid mineral granules move in the thickness of the solution, leaving behind traces resembling the chaotic moves of the bark beetle.

These furrows can have a very different shape, change direction, and their depth is determined by the diameter of the granules. It is they who create the problem when staining.

So:

• If you take a short-nap roller and try to save paint, the recesses will remain completely or partially unpainted. This is not just ugly. Quality suffers, as the plaster remains unprotected from external influences.

The photo shows an example of unsuccessful staining.

• A roller with a fairly long pile, densely soaked with paint, easily reaches the bottom of the recesses, but it does not dry instantly, so it flows down the furrows. To avoid this and prevent an inaccurate appearance of the finished coating, you have to collect the drips with a dry brush or other roller, spending time, effort and your own nerves.

What to do? Is there any instruction to get around these problems? Yes, and not one.

Methods for painting decorative plaster

You may encounter the difficulties described above when tinting any textured plaster that has a second coat. It is clear that they have long been known to finishing specialists and could not remain without a solution. It consists in double staining, which is performed in various ways.

The first method - tinting a plaster mortar

You can add pigment to the plaster before applying it to the walls to get the main background. And then, when the coating dries, paint it with the same or a different color using a short-pile velor roller. Your task is to prevent paint from being poured into the grooves.

To do this, remove excess paint from the roller by rolling it on a clean surface or on the ribbed bottom of the paint bath

Note! You can tint only polymer acrylic plaster. Cement can be pigmented worse, moreover, their quality decreases when dyes are added in an amount of more than 5% of the volume.

Depending on the selected colors of the base and topcoat, the result may be very different.

Decide for yourself how to paint decorative bark beetle plaster:

• To color the layers completely match;

Solid color

• So that the layers are the same color scheme (dark substrate and light outer layer, or vice versa);
• To get a game of contrasts, when a completely different tone is used for tinting the solution than the main paint.

Contrast solution

The most difficult thing in tinting plaster or paint is to achieve the same tone for all batches or batches. Therefore, it is advisable to do this not with your own hands, but with the help of special machines available in large stores.

For reference.When using contrasting colors, this is not so relevant and a slight discrepancy in the tone of the base is allowed.

The second way - double staining

The technology described above is convenient, but not reliable enough, since a continuous protective coating is not created - the grooves remain without a layer of paint. Therefore, if quality and durability are more important to you than speed and simplicity finish finish, choose double staining.

It consists in the fact that the first layer is applied quite thickly so that the paint penetrates into all the recesses. Leaks are eliminated with a sponge or dry roller.

And after it dries, we proceed according to the scheme already described - it is beautiful in a second tone, but already so that it remains only on the convex sections of the plaster.

If there is not much paint on the roller, it will not get into the recesses, and the surface structure will be emphasized in a different color

Tip. Since the price of facade paint is quite high, for the first layer it can be diluted in acceptable proportions. Another saving option is to use a tinted acrylic primer instead, creating a thin, durable film on the surface.

To evaluate the result and understand whether you like it, do not rush to begin large-scale work. Before painting the Bark beetle plaster, try several options on a sample or in an inconspicuous part of the house.

If the texture of the plaster is not pronounced, with small granules, it is possible that it can be perfectly painted in one go. But the deeper the grooves, the more responsibly you should approach this matter, even before the stage of applying the solution, think about how you will decorate the facade.

Conclusion

If a simple description is not enough for you to fully understand the process, we suggest you watch the video in this article and get some more interesting and useful information.