Painted Ceiling Tiles

So when we first moved into our house, our downstairs bathroom ceiling looked like this:

Okay, to be fair, it didn't look exactly like that. It looked like the crackly white part of that. The brown showing through is where I tried - and failed - to scrape the cracking paint smooth so that I could repaint it. It quickly became obvious that simply painting the ceiling was not in the cards, so I started looking for budget-friendly cover-ups instead. I found these really neat, rubbery lightweight backsplash panels at Home Depot that looked like a punched tin ceiling, but at $20 a pop, and with a decent-sized bathroom, they definitely missed the mark about being budget friendly. 

After doing some research online, I found this really cool site - antiqueceilings.com - where you can order thin styrofoam panels that have the exactly same look. At a paltry $2-4 per panel I was able to get enough panels to do my entire ceiling for $40 (plus shipping). I opted to get the plain white panels since they were cheaper, thinking I would save myself some money by painting them myself. In retrospect, it would have been well worth it to save myself a huge amount of time by buying them pre-painted, but since I didn't, I'll walk you through my process. 

When I first opened the box, I was a little disappointed and nervous about how they'd ultimately look on my ceiling - I was expecting something a little more substantial, but these puppies were thin and kind of sad looking on their own (pictures unfortunately not available). I figured they couldn't look worse than the hot mess pictured above, at least, and decided to give them a shot. The nice thing about their thinness is that they weigh almost nothing, so some Loctite was all I needed to get them up. Once they were up, the disappointment vanished:

Please ignore our sad lack of moulding.

And that's pretty much how they've looked for going on a year now, until I finally got frustrated with their unfinished quality and decided to dive in. For the detail-interested, I'm using Martha Stewart Metallic Glaze Specialty Finish in Black Coffee for the color, and Behr Premium Plus Flat Interior ceiling paint for the highlights. 

So to start, I kind of smoosh the paint on, focusing on getting it into the crevices, which is where I want the darkest shadow. I focus on two-three segments at a time, to prevent the paint from drying too much before I can move on to step two.

Step two involves using a rag to smear the paint around, wiping most of it away from the flat and highlighted areas, trying to leave some dark bits in the crevices to keep it looking antique-y. 

Last step is using a sponge to drybrush on the highlights on the raised portions. Home Depot had fancy ~*~sea sponges~*~ for almost $10 a pop in the painting section, but I opted to go old school with this bad boy for $2 instead:

Works just as well, if not better! So in the picture below, you can see all three steps - the white at the top is untouched. The middle row is just painted and needs highlights. The bottom row nearest the wall is finished.

The nice thing about an antique look like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect - you want it too look kind of scratched up and rough, like it's been hanging around for decades. Even so, it's still taking considerably longer than anticipated. I definitely recommend the pre-painted tiles if you're looking at taking on this sort of project yourself!