The assumption here is that you need to repair the wall, or maybe the paint has been stained somehow, but you don’t have an old can of the paint laying around in the basement! In this article, we will show you how to successfully touch-up wall paint

You could borrow or buy a set of paint chips (top image) from your local paint store, or you can choose a better way.

You can choose a quality paint store which will do a better matching job than most of us mere mortals can. You will find these shops all around the London. You can try Dulux decorator center, Homebase or B&Q.

They have a special matching machine which makes the same shade of your color.

You must provide them a small paint sample from the wall to match against.

If your walls are drywall, simply cut out a section of the paper only with a utility knife. Cut an oval-shaped, 1″x 2″ slot in the wall, piercing only through the surface of the paper… an eighth of an inch deep is plenty. Use the knife to lift a corner of the paper, and then peel it off the wall. Take this sample to the paint store for matching. The cleaner the cut, the easier the matching.

You can also cut out a small section of plaster, although it is somewhat messier.

Don’t do touch-ups in high traffic areas or over repairs… Paint the entire wall instead!

If the walls were painted more than a year ago or so, the walls would not touch up well (the exception being with stock off-whites from the same manufacturer… in other words an exact color match). The effective gloss (or sheen) of paints from different manufacturers (yes… even flat paints vary in “flatness”) will make touch-ups show even if the color match is perfect!  Your walls will look like they have some sort of disease!!  This is especially true in high traffic, fingerprints-on-the-walls type areas!

The solution? Get a quart of closely matching paint and just paint that wall, corner to corner, being careful not to get any of the new paint on an adjacent wall. You will be amazed how even slightly different colors will blend well at a corner.

If you must touch-up new or old work…do not ever just brush on the paint. Feather it in!!

Even if your paint is a perfect match, if you just brush it on, it will appear to be more glossy than the rest of the wall! Instead, do this:

  • If you are doing a small area (less than 5″x5″), apply the paint by daubing (NOT brushing) it on, starting in the center of the touch-up area and working outwards until you begin to slightly overlapping into the right paint. As it dries, the irregularities in the surface from the daubing will lessen reflectivity and make the touch-up less noticeable.
  • If you are doing a larger area, put some paint on the area with a brush right up to the edges of the touch-up area, and, using a dry mini-roller, roll briskly over the area to add texture (also called stippling) to the new paint. The roller will give more uniformity in a larger area than the freehand brush approach. As with the brush technique, feather the new paint into the old one to make the touch-up blend into the wall.