Exterior Distressed Finishing:

This can be particularly challenging as we are generally trained in life to create uniform patterns and you have to break this habit to mimic the chaotic patterns we see in nature. I’ve seen some really awful work out there and it is generally a result of poor composition. It’s easy enough to make a 2×2 sample board look natural, but how can we do this on a much larger scale?

Here’s some tips on how to achieve randomness in your distressed finishing:

1- Study actual photos of crumbling plaster exteriors and interiors. Note the size and scale of the different layers, note the shapes and direction. I generally work with about an 80% vertical and 20% horizontal direction, very little or no diagonal direction.

2- The pattern on a sample board must be expanded to the size and scale of the walls. A sample board may be viewed as a miniature version of the wall to be blown up accordingly.

3- Move your body in a large scale. That is, be expansive, move your arms accordingly – don’t work with small, tight motions from the wrist or elbow. Instead work from the shoulder. Stay loose.

4- Create pattern over multiple layers, not just on your final layer. This will force a greater degree of randomness in your overall pattern. Here’s an example:

On this exterior project the client really wanted to see dark brown openings through a Terra Cotta finish. This created a finish with a high degree of contrast so we had to be particularly careful about not allowing the house to have a contrived pattern when completed. We needed to do the finish in two coats since it was a large exterior surface – approximately 20,000 square feet. Rather than cover the entire first coat with the dark brown we chose to cover only about 15-20%.

This “under-pattern” was designed to help the stucco installers find a more realistic shape and scale on their second pass of material. Also, note how the dark brown generally originates from the top of the wall or the sides. This is often what you will see on an actual stuccoed surface where the first coats of plaster are falling away from the surface. Kind of looked like a giant cow for a while and the country club’s community board got a little nervous, but fortunately our clients had faith in me.

This photos shows the work in progress on the 2nd layer: The dark brown is revealed in small, linear shapes beneath the 2nd terra cotta stucco layer. By following the pattern initiated in the first layer, we had a much easier time avoiding the contrived, obvious, unrealistic pattern I was concerned about.

And here is a detail of the finished exterior surface.

Final tip: PRACTICE!! On a 4×8 sheet of drywall, or your mom’s house. You’ll get the hang of it. Just don’t try to figure it out on a multi million dollar job site if you can help it. Unless you have nerves of steel. We don’t.

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