I have just sprayed six items with the Annie Sloane chalk paint. Although they say you can apply without much preparation I sanded well including between coats. It does cover well but needs three coats of wax, this reacts with the paint and can take up to three weeks to finaly cure. Without the wax the paint is rather soft.
Four small tables just needed just two coats of paint, the other two tables with drawers which were originally the very dark mahogany had a orange tint come through the first coat. This is either from the dye used or the wood , a coat of Zinsser 123 sorted this out.
My wife wanted this paint finish and agreed to do all the waxing we are both pleased with the result. I have to say the waxing is as much work as the preparation and painting.
The spraying was done in my workshop which was heated and all had to be water based paints. The sprayer was a HVLP Earlex HV5500, the paint needed to be thinned to a viscosity of about 80 seconds or less, a 2mm needle was used with a vertical spray pattern of about four inches. This contained the overspray to a minimum, I had a lot of narrow legs and adjusted the head to suit. This spray unit has three options easily switched between. The finished spray coat was almost perfect it was the first time I had done any spraying for very many years and had never used a water based paint before.
I did as an experiment brush paint the first coat on one table but was not as pleased with the finish and found it did not save time despite the cleaning of the sprayer.