Painting Pallets

Here's a quick guide on how I painted some wooden pallets for my next setup. The pallets I'm painting are from Warsenal. I like these ones because they use a mix of acrylic and wood. The acrylic allows for much thinner slats than are available from other companies and so a more realistic design. The acrylic also takes paint better than MDF which absorbs the paint.

Here's some I painted earlier! So to start I painted wood grain on one side of all the slats. The beauty of painting wood grain is that you can't really make a mistake, just paint thin wavy lines and let the brush go where it wants.

The reverse side won't be on show as it will face into the pallet so I just gave that a quick brush with my mid brown.

Next comes the struts. Again, I painted one side with wood grain and the reverse with my dark brown.

Then it was time to assemble them. The first few were accompanied by some post-watershed language but after a while I got the process down and they went together quickly.

The final step is drybrushing. Here I was trying to apply a thin coat of paint so the wood grain still shows through. I applied two coats, the first of a mid brown and the second a highlight coat of a mid brown & bone.

And that's it, nice and simple. They look good piled up or stacked against walls or, of course, with other kinds of scatter on them. 

Until next time, keep on painting

The Duke