I'd been trying to figure out for a while how I was going to "fix" the damaged area of this end table. It was my parents', and I hadn't even realised for some time that it wasn't real oak, like most of their living room furniture, and the other end tables, but turned out it is made of pressboard, with a fake wood laminate. Now, no hate on this! I have plenty of pressboard stuff, and it usually lasts well and looks great, but this one had gotten some water damage, and if you've ever had pressboard furniture, you know what that means!
I forgot to take a picture before I started at all, but here are a couple pics that show it a bit...
Setting up all the nice stuff, both my things that had weathered well, or that I fixed up, and the stuff of my parents' that I inherited, in my new digs that are actually NICE (not like fancy nice, but not ghetto either), I didn't want that messing up the look of everything else, but the rest of it looked good, and it is a pretty solid piece. So, I started With sealing the damaged bit with epoxy.
Well.. ACTUALLY, I started with trying to paint a base layer over it all, but quickly discovered that the paint soaked right into the compressed sawdust that is pressboard, no matter how much paint I used, and just looked like there was NO paint there, which is why you can see paint on part of the table, but the one spot that looks like I didn't paint in that pic, so I did the epoxy bit, and THEN added a spray paint base.
For some reason, I also didn't take a pic of it fully spray painted, before the next step. Probably because I was in the process, but it was fully that khaki colour before I switched to the acrylic paints.
The next step was adding in large brushes of the main few colour blends, and some contrasting lines, get the feel of wood grain.
You can see my creative mess pile.. err.. I mean workstation there, above. 
Another angle and more coverage.
Starting to add in more texture here.
Then I decided that I really liked how it was looking, but, it didn't match the rest of the table, so then came the idea to make it look like the top was made from reclaimed wood, so I painted the lines for that, and started working them in with the texturing.
Yeah, it just looks like lines messily drawn on there at first, but trust the process! 
More, more, more blending and texturing.
Just about done, but still doesn't have quite the right look.
Annnnnd, now I routinely forget that it's not just real wood, like the other stuff, and nobody who visits believes it's just painted unless they look really close either. I am happy with the end result!
