Look through Amedeo Cilli’s decorative concrete project photos and you’ll find stone patterns with color complexity and rugged texture that look straight out of nature. Actually, they’re the result of several decades of technique fine-tuning.
Stamping & Texturing Concrete
Concrete’s appearance can be altered with stamping tools and textured mats to replicate everything from brick and tile to wood and stone.
Stamping Concrete the Old-Fashioned Way
Unique Concrete, a family-run business out of West Milford, N.J., stamps concrete without the stamp and texture mats of today. Instead, they use old-fashioned tools to create a layer of what they call “cast-in-place concrete tile or stone.”
Swordfish Stampable Overlay Design Recipe
This top-to-bottom (well, really bottom-to-top) overlay recipe is great for putting down a distinctive design, such as this swordfish.
Placing Quality Stamped Concrete in Six Steps
I have identified six steps that all successful hunks of stamped concrete have in common. Bypassing one of the six steps will leave a stamping professional a rung short of a true level of potential. Perfection starts well before any color broadcasts across a wet concrete’s surface, and even well before a ready-mix truck arrives.
How Should You Color Your Stamped Concrete?
Color selection for stamped and textured concrete is always at the top of the list of issues people question me about. My goal when answering questions like this has always been to try and provide good advice on color selection so no one has to come back and ask about color correction.
Helping a Nonprofit with Decorative Concrete Makes a Great First Impression
I was invited to attend the preplanning meeting for the 2013 Concrete Decor Show to look at potential sites for the decorative concrete makeover workshops. We looked at three different sites, and in the end it was clear that the Charlotte Rescue Mission had the most need of our services.
Meeting the Demand for Crack Control in Stamped Concrete
Stamped concrete is the very foundation of decorative concrete industry. The ability to take concrete and add pattern and color separates you from your competition. This ability also increases a customer’s expectations. Simply put, most customers will not accept a random crack running through patterned concrete, nor should they.
Fixing Slippery Stamped
Concrete Near Pools
The combination of pools and stamped concrete doesn’t necessarily spell disaster. For one thing, when a stamped concrete surface near a pool is slick, a topical sealer, not the texture, is often the culprit.
Consistent Concrete Yields Superior Stamped Concrete Projects
Behind every successful slab of stamped concrete is an accumulation of effort by you (the decorative concrete artist) and your local ready-mix provider. If one participant falls short the project becomes compromised, maybe not to the point of being unsalvageable but still to where it does not meet the goal of most professionals.
How Do You Fix a Stamped Concrete “Patchwork Quilt”?
Popular Concrete Decor columnist Chris Sullivan explores ways to fix a stamped concrete job that came out looking like a patchwork quilt
