I’ve always loved the furniture at Anthropologie, just not the price tag of those pieces. I’ve recreated dupes for 2 of those pieces. You can find the post for my take on the bone inlay dresser here, and my recreation of the ikat inlay cabinet here. The biggest difference in this dupe and my prior creations is that I used a stencil to create the pattern and design for these other two pieces and this time I only used painters tape to create the design. I’ve wanted to attempt this Optical Inlay pattern for a while, but I was waiting for the right piece of furniture.

You may ask, what is the right piece of furniture? When creating a piece with an detailed design, it is best to find a plain piece of furniture with clean lines and inset drawers and doors. Pieces with molding or intricate wood carvings are not good candidates for busy paint designs. I knew as soon as I got this cabinet, I wanted to try to create the bold and black and white pattern.

Here are the supplies I used to create this piece:

• Frog Tape .94″
• Bin Shellac Primer
• Aqua Lock Black Primer
• Masking Plastic with Tape
• Sherwin Williams Pure White
• Sherwin Williams Iron Ore
• Sherwin Williams Blue Peacock

I cleaned the entire piece and sanded all the surfaces with 200 grit sandpaper to remove the slick finish to prep for primer. I painted several coats of the Bin Shellac Primer to block out any bleed through from the wood. On the inside of the piece I put a coat of the Black Aqua Lock Primer. I wanted to paint the inside a deep teal color and the black primer would reduce the number of coats of paint of the teal color.

I love using the Aqua Lock Black primer. It is water based and easy to clean up! It also levels beautifully. I painted the inside of the cabinet first and sealed it with a satin poly. I taped off the inside of the cabinet to protect the finish with the masking plastic with tape.

I next painted Sherwin Williams Pure White on the outside of the cabinet first. It will be much easier to paint the black stripes on top of white paint, than vice versa. I painted the satin poly on the white paint before adding the black stripes.

Before planning out the stripe pattern, I studied the anthropologie piece that I was using as my inspiration. There were different variations of the stripes and the pattern. I made up the pattern as I went along. I started by finding the center of top and put my first piece of tape at a 45 degree angle. I built out the pattern from by placing a piece of tape between each piece to create stripes of the same width.