Painted Dresser - Restoration Hardware style- Tutorial

Happy New Year!  I hope you had a great Holiday Season.  I've been on a bit of a break from blogging.  Decided to focus on life, and really once all my Christmas crafts were done and the house was decorated I really didn't have many creative juices flowing anyway.  I actually just finished removing all my Christmas decorations today, and by removing, I mean they are pile in the basement ready to be re-boxed until next year.

I am still working on redecorating my master bedroom.  Gosh, it feels like forever, but the good thing about it, is that it's upstairs and tucked away, so people never really see the mess.  My latest painting job may very well be my most difficult to date.  Looking back at the pictures I realize I've been working on this for almost two months, but seriously I am in love and don't care how long it took.   I wanted to try and re-create the wood on my new Restoration Bed.  If you look carefully in the mirror you can see a glimpse of it.  They have such a beautiful finish, and while I splurged on the bed, spending $3,000 or so on a dresser just wasn't happening.  Especially when we had a really great quality dresser, with a not so great finish straight out of 1992.

I started by removing the hardware and painting the dresser in Annie Sloan Chalk Paint - Coco.  Lovely as it was, it just didn't have the depth and layers I needed.

The next step I added the dark wax directly to the paint.  This was the part when I thought oh s#*@!  What have I done?  But of course it was just that first stroke that freaked me out.  It really does change the color of the paint dramatically.

Here is a picture of the color difference with and without the wax.  

And here is the entire dresser with dark wax.  Again, quite lovely, but not where I wanted to be.

I then painted Annie Sloan old white on the dresser with a dry paint brush, allowing it to dry (which on top of the wax was still workable) and buffing in streaks of dark wax.  This process is what took forever.  Once I was happy with the finish I allowed it to sit for several days, and then applied a coat of clear wax over the top and buffed it with a soft cloth.  The end result was a multi-layer effect with lots of character.
 I will let the pictures below speak for themselves.  

I spray painted the hardware in Oil Rubbed Bronze.

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