Bright and Banged-Up

• Highlight a distressed finish with a bold paint color. The color draws attention to the hammer dents, screwdriver gouges, and chain scratches and scarring you inflict on a wooden bookcase to “age” it. Try a bright red paint -- a lipstick red – to make sure no one misses your handiwork. For more paint-magic antiquing, first apply a base coat of turquoise or green. After two topcoats of red, sand the edges and corners of the shelves where they would have experienced rubbing and scraping over the years to reveal the color of the previous paint. A more subdued look makes use of barn red paint in a flat finish that resembles the siding of a weathered barn.
  
  

Worn Paint

• A faded robin’s egg blue is the perfect color for a handmade wood bookcase that needs a distressed finish. Paint with sage or turquoise tones will work, too. Try mixing things up a little by painting the bookcase and then adding some green or brown to the leftover paint and dry-brushing streaks over some areas of the bookcase to vary the paint color. The streaked areas will appear worn or dirty – this works well on panel or shelf edges that would have been exposed to the most wear.
  
  

Crazed and Crackled

• Pick your color for a bookshelf you want to distress. Then pick a contrasting color to start. Paint the bookcase with the contrast color and when it dries, brush on a coat of crackle glaze. As soon as the glaze gets tacky, apply the top coat of paint. The top coat will dry with crazing that mimics very old, degrading paint. As the glaze dries, it breaks the paint on top of it into cracks that reveal a hint of the color below. Crackle glaze is one of the easiest ways to distress a bookshelf or any wood furniture with paint.
  
  

Shabby Chic Wall System

• Mix up several colors on mismatched side-by-side bookcases for a shabby chic wall system. Use milk paints to get old-fashioned colors and distress the pieces by banging and gouging them before painting. Sand some edges after painting to simulate wear. Try antique white, vanilla cream, whipped butter, sage and confederate gray-blue for a low-key line-up. You can adapt this look to a modern décor by treating the bookcase wall as an art installation – like a sculpture with storage. Milk paint goes perfectly with traditional furnishings, patterns and colors.