A recent interiors trend has been the introduction of painted stickers to replace paint samples. Marketed as being simple and straightforward, there’s a few reasons we chose to stick with providing Wall Paint tester size tins over stickers.

Recyclable & Resusable

At Annie Sloan, we’re committed to protecting the environment. Disposable stickers are non-recyclable. They’re touted as ensuring you won’t be left with tins of unused paint; here at Annie Sloan we’re confident you’ll be so impressed with our paint you’ll find a project for it. The tins themselves are recyclable. Even better, reuse them. Our tester pots can moonlight as paintbrush holders, tiny pots for nursery plants like cress, or paint them with any left-over paint to match your walls and use as tealight holders.

Feel for the quality

We want to ensure the easiest, happiest, best painting experience possible for our customers. We believe that painting is a process, way beyond an end product. When you’re trialling different paints there’s so much more to consider beyond how they look when they’ve been applied to sample cards. How the paint feels as you brush it will tell you so much about the quality of the product. You can get a much better feel for the quality of the paint when you apply it yourself. Annie Sloan Wall Paint has been formulated to give maximum pigment pay off, suspended in a rich and creamy formula which is easy to apply and can be built up where necessary. You’ll love the smoothness and ease of application, whether you’re applying using a paintbrush or a roller.

Authentic finish

A sticker can cover a multitude of sins! You won’t see how the colour looks on your wall. You’re seeing how it looks on a perfectly primped, primed surface. You’re seeing how it looks sprayed with precision rather than applied by an actual human being. It’s not an authentic, realistic representation of the finish which you can trust.

Finally: you can always create your own colour cards by painting onto cardboard, scrap paper or even a sheet of leftover wallpaper. This way you can move the sample around the room, and feel first-hand how beautifully Annie Sloan Wall Paint applies.

Our Top Tips for How To Apply a Wall Paint Sample

1. Don’t paint colours too close together. As Annie frequently preaches, using different colours in close proximity will highlight different tones within those colours. While this is very useful when building a palette, it can be distracting and confusing when you’re pairing two similar shades together to see which you prefer.

2. Observe in different lights. Make sure to review how the colour looks first thing in the morning, in the afternoon, and once darkness falls.

3. Paint patches on different walls. If you’re intending to paint an entire room one colour, you will want to see how the shade you choose works in darker corners as well as on window-facing walls.

4. Create a room or home scheme by drawing a floorplan then painting testers on to the paper to get a real feel of how the new colour refresh in one room will impact the rest of your home.

5. Make sure your test areas are a decent size, we recommend that they’re at least 30cm x 30cm. One of our 120ml tester size paint tins will cover just over 1.3m squared.

6. Take photographs. How your interior looks on camera is increasingly important. This will also help you to review and compare different colours during the selection stage of the process.