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Using aged terracotta pots is a great way to bring farmhouse style to your porch, deck, or garden. If you don’t have time to wait for your clay pot to age naturally, try this tip using paint instead!
If you love the classic look of aged terracotta pots, today’s post will be a fun one for you. Genuine aged terra-cotta can take many seasons to develop the perfect patina. If you’d like to purchase pre-aged pots, or even pots with a faux aged look to them in a garden boutique or specialty home decor store, they can be a bit expensive. Aged antique terra cotta pots are a traditional garden staple and won’t ever go out of style, so they’re a great investment, but painting a plant pot achieves a look that is just as beautiful, and also incredibly affordable. Here are two different techniques for painting terracotta pots, one light and one dark, to recreate that beautiful, aged look.
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How to Age Terra Cotta Pots With Paint: Whitewashed Effect
For this method, you’ll need a basic terra-cotta pot, some white paint, some light grey paint, a paintbrush, and some paper towel.
If you’re going to be using this pot as an outdoor planter for potted plants in the backyard, definitely use a paint made for being outdoors like this patio paint that I used, pictured above. You can also use regular craft paint or even chalk paint, and then go over the whole pot with an outdoor topcoat if you want to turn your terracotta planters into outdoor pots.
If you’ll be using these containers indoors, on a covered porch, or in a greenhouse, go ahead and use whatever matte finish paint strikes your fancy.
The process is pretty simple. First, dip your paintbrush in the white paint and use a piece of paper or a paper towel to dab off any excess. You’ll then dry brush the paint around your terra cotta pot horizontally. Try to keep things fairly uneven, with more paint in some areas and less in others.
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Important Tip to Remember for Painted Terracotta Pots
The important thing I learned about this process is that the paint dries almost instantly because it’s absorbed so quickly by the porous clay. Working with terracotta is much different than painting over materials like ceramic, glazed pottery, or plastic flower pots. So, once you apply paint to an area, you can’t really wipe it off very easily. The rule of thumb to follow here is to apply paint fairly lightly and layer it up to make it heavier in some areas. You can always add more paint, but you can’t take it away.
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How to Age Terra Cotta Pots: Finishing Up the Look
Some people may find that they like this look and choose to stop here, which is great. I found that this look was a bit too “brushstroke-y” for my liking, so I decided to layer on a bit of light grey paint as well. I used a paper towel dipped in the paint to apply the top layer of grey paint so that I could avoid those brush strokes and try to blend things a bit better. Well, the blending didn’t really happen, of course, because, as I said before, the paint really just sticks in place almost immediately. I still like the look I ended up with, though!
If you find that you’ve applied too much paint, you can use sandpaper to remove a bit of it. You’ll need to use quite a coarse grit because finer grit sandpapers don’t seem to do a darn thing.
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A Bright, Fresh Look for This Planter
I like the look of a mostly greyish-white, aged terra cotta pot, with just a bit of the terra cotta showing, so that’s what I went for. If you’re feeling creative, though, you can try adding in a bit of green to mimic the look of moss or even another color to give the look of old chippy paint.
Dark Aged Terracotta Pots
I’ve been using this method using darker tones lately to create beautiful planters for my houseplants and I’ve loved how every single one I’ve done has turned out. These look great sitting on a console table, lined up in front of a window, or on a plant stand. For this method, you’ll need some black paint in any finish, as well as lighter tan craft paint and darker brown craft paint. You’ll also need baking soda.
You start out with a basic clay pot, just like with the lighter method above, but you apply one coat of black paint as a first step. Full paint coverage isn’t important because you’ll be adding more layers of paint over top, but the black establishes a dark, moody undertone for the pot. I used a coat of Benjamin Moore “Onyx” paint because that’s what I had.
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Adding “Mud” to Your Faux Aged Pots
After that first coat of paint is dry, you can move on to the fun, slightly messy part of the process. Mix about 1/2 a teaspoon of the light tan paint with about 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to create a kind of a mud. Using a scrunched up paper towel, dab and smear the mud unevenly over the pot, focussing mostly on either the top part of the pot, or the bottom half. I find it looks most realistic if the “mud” is concentrated on one part of the pot, and on the other section, you let more of the black paint color show through.
Next, mix in a bit of the darker brown paint into your mud, creating a darker tone. Using your paper towel, dab and smudge a bit of this darker mud here and there over the lighter mud. You will probably come to a point where you’ll think you’ve overdone it and completely ruined the effect, but it’s pretty hard to mess this up. When you stand back, you may even find that the sections that you think you ruined are actually the parts of the planter that you like the most.
This planter can be sprayed or painted with an outdoor topcoat if needed, but you may just want to leave the pots to age even more as you fill them with potting mix and stones for drainage. Regular daily watering will only enhance the aged look of your terracotta pots.
I definitely plan to do a few more of these this year in different sizes, especially since terracotta pots are so inexpensive and easy to come by.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.