The Art of Touch Ups

Doing touch ups is a skill that can take some time and knowledge to master, and even then, things can still go wrong. Recently, someone came into our store, Paint Life Supply Co, and they were having frustrations doing touch ups in the center of the wall. On top of that, they didn’t have access to the original paint! 

There’s lots of reasons that you might be needing to do touch ups on any given surface. More often than not, there’s just small nicks and dings that need to be repaired or you might be preparing to sell the house. Long term sunlight hitting walls, or dust, can also cause a sheen and color loss on walls. A lot of times I see issues behind pictures or frames that have been hung up on the walls and are now being taken down. Additionally, the longer it’s been since the wall has been painted, the less successful touch ups will be - if it’s been over 10 years, the paint has probably faded considerably, and even with the original paint, you might not be able to get it to match the current color 100%. 

It’s interesting, the more the walls have been painted, the easier it is to successfully do touch-ups, as the sheen is more likely to have leveled out and it won’t seem like you’re building up too much paint. If the walls have only been painted once or twice, it’s a lot more delicate of a process to avoid creating a shiny spot on the wall. 

First things first, having the original paint is very critical to doing touch ups. Taking samples of the paint into Home Depot or Lowe’s to get a color match will never get you the exact same paint that was previously used - even the best color matching systems can still not be entirely correct. Plus, knowing the right sheen is very important to ensuring that there are no shiny or dull spots on the wall in the end. 

When using the original paint, it’s very important to shake, stir, and mix the can to ensure that the pigment hasn’t settled on the bottom or the top of the can, and that there aren’t large dry chunks sitting in the paint. I’ll also occasionally water the paint down by 5% to cut down the sheen a little bit for a better match. 

Using the right tools can also impact the final match on the wall. Unless you’re going to just re-roll the entire wall, which I might recommend if there are a lot of touch ups on a given wall, you’re not going to want to use a roller. So, depending on the touch ups you’re needing to do, you’re going to want to use either a soft-filament 2” angle sash brush like a Premier Hampton or artist brushes from Paint Life Supply Co. to do your touch ups. You’re not going to be wanting to apply a ton of paint, so these options will allow you to apply paint just on the desired area. 

Now, as you start to do your touch ups, using a dry brush is very important! This allows you to feather out the edges as you apply your light amount of paint to these nicks and dings on the walls. Feathering out the paint will ensure that the area is not as noticeable, and will help reduce the visible brush strokes. And don’t worry if you can still see the area once the paint is dry - make sure you know the cure time of the product so that you can view the area again once the paint is fully cured. 

A lot of times, you’ll also be doing other wall repairs at the same time that you’re doing touch ups, such as removing nails, filling wall anchors, spackling, etc. I always carry a Paint Life Supply Co. custom carbide scraper with me to deal with any imperfections on the walls - if I’m already doing touch ups, it’s not hard to scrape a few large texture bubbles and add a little paint there as well. If there are ugly wall anchors visible, you can knock them in with a screwdriver, scrape any excess off around the hole, and spackle the hole! Just make sure that when you’re doing any spackling repairs that you wipe the excess texture around the hole off. If you swipe a large amount of spackle on the wall, it will fill in the surrounding texture and start to create a flat spot. Depending on the size of the repair, I might even do a light sand on the spackle once it’s dry. 

When doing cabinet touch ups, the tools I’ll have with me are an Ekadiamond sanding sponge for any rough spots, a 5-in-1 tool like the 2 Edge Knife to clean up any nicks & dings, and this set of cabinet touch up brushes, Paint Life Supply Co. sells a perfect set for cabinets. A lot of the same principles as doing touch ups on walls still apply here, except that you’re going to want to be even more careful when using brushes. Most of the time on cabinets, we’ve applied the paint using an HVLP or airless sprayer and we want to maintain that factory-like finish. If we’re doing work on the edges or the backside of the cabinet door, you can feel more free to use a brush to fix imperfections to to fill holes from cup hooks during the spraying process. Keep in mind that it might take 2-3 coats to get the imperfections perfectly matched to the rest of the door. 

If you’re working with lacquers, which I don’t do anymore due to the flammability risk, you can get the same paint put into a spray can at the time you purchase it, and use that to do touch ups with. This has been very convenient in the past, if I’ve ever needed to respray large areas or even reshoot the whole front face of a cabinet door after I’ve already cleaned out my sprayer. But, at the end of a day, you can work a lot of magic with a light touch and a small brush!