Hey there again my friends, this is the Cheapest Calgary Painter again, and in today's Splatter Ceilings blog post here on our cheap Calgary Painting internet website, we are going to teach you and review with you guys and girls out there how to spray an orange peel texture, also sometimes known as a splatter texture ceiling, or simply a splatter ceiling.
This splatter ceilings blog post is going to walk you through a little guide here, and show you how to change the shape, and look of your texture, and how to spray it on your ceilings and walls if you are looking to complete that work yourself.. And of course, we're going to show you and explain to you how to do that the right so you get perfect splatter ceilings results.
All right in today's post, I'm going to teach you how to spray an orange peel texture, also known as a splatter ceiling texture. Now, we just finished spraying in this splatter ceiling in our customers new construction house currently under construction. That's likely the best time to get in and get the splatter coat down when there is no floors or fixtures installed.
If you found our knockdown ceiling texture page on our cheap Calgary Painting internet website, you should know that they're very similar ceiling textures, but over all they are two different animals. So we're going to teach you how to spray orange peel on this this ceiling. The first thing you need to do is prime out the ceiling.
You could grab the old brush and roller and brush and roll in your ceiling, but the professionals use a spray painting machine to get the job done faster, cleaner, and with less labor and time involved. You should be thinking about spray painting in your ceilings before proceeding to go about installing your splatter ceilings. We're doing orange peel this time.
So here we go. What we're going to use today is a professional style hopper. There are various styles of this type of hopper. This is actually just a little $30 no name pro hopper, and basically and it's turned out to be one of my my favorites to use. We've got about four texture hoppers around the shop, and this one does a great job every time.
Now, the disadvantage on this one is, it has a smaller hopper up here for holding the mud in. So like if we compare that to my other style this is a name brand one here, this is my parts hopper. You can see it's kind of stripped down version by wall board tools. I do have another wall board that is functional, that's why I've used parts off of it.
You probably can't help but notice and see the difference is the hopper sizes. And other than that that's the main difference between them. One simply holds more mud than the other one, and allows you to spray in more spatter ceilings before you have to reload it or refill it up with mud. And honestly I really like the way this little cheap thing works.
One of the things I like is this the stout trigger pull. That one over there, and this one was getting my a little bit used and abused, and the others are both getting kind of spongy right here. And that causes this little piston in here to not seat well. And so it drips a lot. Well this one. You don't have that problem with that stronger spring. It might wear your hand out a little bit more, but I'll show you what happens.
This part right here is where the air comes out of. It's routed through here, and then it seats against this nozzle tip, and here these are interchangeable. I'll show you on here in a minute. There's three or four sizes of these. There's basically small, medium, and large, and then there's a cone shaped one we use for spraying the good old popcorn texture.
So when you pull the trigger, it pulls this away from that tip, and that allows that air to hit the mud. That's near this tip opening, and it breaks it up. It's all explain how that affects it here in a minute but when this gets weak like it does on those ones, it just doesn't seat well, and so it leaks a lot. So the first thing I want to do is go over the variables that affect how this pattern is going to come out.
You can make this sprayer here spray really tiny drops. Medium sized drops, or really large drops. I've just outlined two styles here. The fine texture, and a heavy texture. Of course, you can find a blend in between there. So what gives you a fine small drop tiny texture. That would be a small tip size. Kind of sounds obvious doesn't it.
A higher CFM. By CFM, I'm talking about the cubic feet per minute of air. So the more air you let go through the gun. The more it's going to break it up. And I'll show you more about that, but we do that with this little valve here. You can hear it lets the air through, so the more air let through, the smaller the drops are.
The next thing would be a short trigger pull as I showed you here. The more you pull it, the further away it gets. Well the less you pull, the closer it is to the tip. So only a little bit of mud gets in there, it breaks it up finer. We pull it really far, more mud gets up there, it shoots out bigger drops. And then the final thing would be the thinness of the mud.
The thinner the mud, the more it can break it up. Thicker the mud, the less it can break it up. Now you don't want to get it too thick, and I'll show you that in a minute, because it has to gravity flow through there, and if it's too thick, it's just not going to flow. So on the opposite side, if you want a heavy texture, you want a large tip size, a low CFM, just a little bit of air.
The less air, the bigger the drops, and you want a long trigger pull, and thicker mud. Now that doesn't mean you want all of those. You blend them according to what you want. Once you have a pattern you like and think will look good, you just use the same settings and material all along the way to get a nice consistent result all over your ceilings and walls.
All right, now, when I spray, I mainly adjust a couple things at a time. I don't necessarily adjust everything. Like I can have a small tip size, and still get some pretty big drops by having lower air or a longer pull and thicker mud. It just depends kind of what I've got in my bucket. And so the main things I concentrate on are our the CFM.
Let's just put a star right here, and the trigger pull. With those two variables right there you can change this splatter ceiling spray finish quite a bit, but if you want to change it even more, even bigger drops, than adjust these other things. But if you just focus on these two things, I'll show you how you can just change a lot with that.
So for example today, we're not going to change the thickness of the mud, we're not going to change the tip size, so we're really just going to bury these two things, and give us three different types of texture. So let's go ahead and get into that. I'm sure you're going to wonder how thick the texture should be.
That's always a question. How thin should it be, and what do I use. Okay first of all, I'm just using box mud. You can use spantex mud in the purple box, or span lite in the yellow or orange box. You can use pretty much whatever you've got on hand, because most all of it will work for texture. You can use the green label all purpose drywall compound if you want too.
Whatever you have, you take your box mud, and you thin it down until it's really thin. You can see it pours out of here. I would call this a medium thin, because if you want a fine orange peal or a fine splatter ceiling spray, I would go even thinner than that.
So there's a whole cup of mud to try, and give you a better idea. You can see as everybody likes to say it's kind of like pancake batter, but for a fine orange peel or finer splatter ceilings, you actually want it thinner than that, unless you like them really thin pancakes. So let's add a little texture here. I normally just pour it out of the bucket.
But when I'm doing small stuff I have that dipping cup. But first thing I would mention is, before you just start spraying, find something off to the side, some masking, some plastic hanging off the wall, something to test your pattern out on, so that you have an idea what you're going to get. Because you need to know if you got these variables adjusted right.
I should also point out this adjustment knob on the back here. All this does is stop you from pulling it too far, so if you want to spray a lot you set this to where you pull this trigger at the maximum and it stops against that. That way you can just hang on and spray. You don't have to adjust with your hand each time.
I'm pretty used to it, so I normally just adjust as I go, but that's what that's about so, there's really only two adjustments on the gun. Okay that just gives us our first pattern. Okay so that covers all of the variables that affect the look of it. So what I'm going to do is get right into it and show you how I how I do that.
Like I said, I'm only going to vary two things, that trigger pull, and the amount of air I'm going to use. The same mud that I used for the knock down ceilings post. I'm just going to use less trigger pull and more air, that's going to break it up more. So that shows that you really don't have to vary too much with things if you wanted a really fine orange peel or splatter spray.
We're going to say this is fine. You might want to thin your mud down more than I have here, but I can get a pretty fine one even with this thicker mud. So let's go ahead and fill that up, and get going. Now I'm running about 35 psi coming out of my air compressor. We adjust the amount of air with this thing.
We adjust the trigger pull here. Okay so for this first one on the fine one we're going to do minimal trigger pull with lots of air. It would have been a little bit easier if this was thinner, but I've got another job to spray with this same mud tomorrow, so I don't want to thin it down. That just shows that you can get a pretty fine one even with a slightly thicker mud.
Now for the second one I'm going to pull the trigger a little bit further, with a little bit less air, probably going to be similar on the air, because of the thickness of the mud. Now I recommend you normally find a test spot off to the side and test, and if not, just spray your big wall that you're working on and then just scrape it off when you're done.
And then start over which is kind of like we did here. I decided I'm just going to use maximum air flow here, and just more trigger pull. And I'll get that medium orange peel or medium splatter ceiling spray. Let me get down there. We got a chunk of unmixed mud in the hopper plugging up the hopper. It happens from time to time. Sometimes you can take a wire and poke it in there and kind of break it up.
Or sometimes you can just put your finger over the end pull the trigger, and that forces the air to hit your finger, blows back in, and blows the chunk away, and a lot of times that'll solve it. Watch out it may bubble out of here like a hot spring. Okay you can see I got a little bit bigger drops than over here, so we're going to move on to that one.
Now I did forget to explain my pattern on the last video I explained it what I normally try and do is an even pattern I'll try and do about a 50% overlap each time and then often I go over it 2 to 3 times and that makes it more even if you try and do it all in one pass sometime it's not as even I don't recommend the random pattern I see some people doing Don't just do this kind of all over thing either going circles you can just go in circles or do a pattern like I did but try and go a little bit out of time and build up to what you're looking for instead of trying to get it all at once let's move on to the heavy one okay so for this one I'm basically just going to pull the trigger more I think I'm going to use the same air pressure again I usually experiment a little bit
After I spray one, especially repairs, I often look it over and try and fill in those light areas, so I even it out more, and then it just looks better. And if you're trying to match one, you're often want to look over to the side, and see if it's matching the way you want. We will be doing a whole separate blog post on matching an orange peel texture.
So let me go over these points once more. Don't leave just yet because I want to make sure you got this. To get a light one, light trigger pull lots of air, medium, same air more trigger pull, and more trigger pull. That's basically the most important thing is the amount of trigger pull, but if you're not getting what you want look adjust those variables and you'll get what you want.
And that's about all there is to spraying in our spraying out splatter ceilings or orange peel ceilings on your ceilings or on your walls. We've done hundreds, if not thousands of interior ceilings and walls along the way. For the best of the best results you are likely much better off calling in professionals to complete your ceilings and walls for you.
The high quality Calgary Painters over in the north east at the low cost 1/2 Price Pro Calgary Painting company can likely help you save a lot of time and a lot of money on splatter ceilings or orange peel ceilings compared to all the other painting companies and ceiling texturing companies in town. You could get yourself a low cost professional splatter ceilings price quote or estimate in just a quick phone call to (587) 800-2801.
