How to Get a Watercolor Effect On Your Floors

If you didn’t already know, there are a multitude of designs and colors you can achieve with concrete staining. So many, in fact, that it can become hard to choose exactly what design you want. If you’re looking for floors that have a real impact but that are beautiful and artistic, a new popular style for floors is the watercolor effect.

A watercolor effect aims to mimic the medium of painting where colors are soft, diffused, and blended together to form a design or pattern. Fortunately, water-based stains are capable of an extraordinary range of pigments and are very easy to blend together, but if you want a darker more inconsistent blend that will look natural you can also use acid stains. For an easy guide to achieving these floors, keep reading:

Step 1: Prepare the floor for staining

Before concrete staining can commence, the floor must be prepared. It needs to be thoroughly cleaned of any dust or debris and any surface cracks or holes should be tended to before applying the stain. This ensures an even color throughout the room.

Step 2: Choose your design and prepare your colors

Before applying the stain, you should already know what you want the final product to look like. Decide if you want a gradient design, an abstract design, or a soft and diffused mix of colors to give it a marble effect. When you know what design you want and what colors you’ll need for it, get your colors ready.

Step 3: Dilute portions of your stain

Watercolor effects need an effect that gradually blends dark to light, so even if you use multiple colors, you’ll want to have diluted versions of the colors too to make the blending natural and beautiful.

Step 4: Stain your floor evenly with your base color

As with any normal watercolor painting, you need a solid even base coat to make the colors you apply on top pop. We recommend a light color that will complement the rest of your palette.

Step 5: Start applying the stain as needed to achieve your design

This effect uses two types of blending: wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet, and knowing which to use can make all the difference in your design. The wet-on-dry technique means waiting until the stain underneath is dry before applying the next color. This technique creates more solid delineations between colors. This technique is useful for when your design has multiple elements that you don’t want mixing together but when you still want the colors to look blended.

The wet-on-wet technique is the real game-changer when it comes to achieving this effect. Apply the next color while the stain is still wet. By doing this, you are able to mix the colors together to create a gradient and you can also blend them to create seamless transitions between colors. You can also further diffuse the color with this technique by using the diluted forms of the color we told you to set aside in Step 3.

Step 6: Let dry before sealing

Make sure to let the design completely dry down. Waiting until it dries down ensures that your design will stay intact and will give you an opportunity to look it over before sealing. Once it has dried down completely and you’re satisfied with the way it looks, apply a sealer to lock it down!