Painted Furniture - Bespoke Bookcase

My work is made particularly satisfying when there's an interesting/lovely point of reference to begin with on a project. Here my clients had a rather special and unique collection of books and were looking for an individual piece of furniture to display them.   

After a fruitless search for an appropriate old /vintage piece of furniture to house the books the clients decided to enrol the help of furniture designer/maker Jacob Littlejones and have a bespoke furniture piece made. The clients requested not to have it made of MDF (hurray!) so Jacob recommended tulip wood because of its relative flatness and stability.See his cabinet making and other varied work here.www.jacoblittlejones.co.uk.

The collection of Late Victorian/ Early Edwardian books were fascinating in themselves; mainly stories for boys with tales of empire,adventure and morals of the era. Most importantly for me though were their lovely clothbound covers with visually striking pictorial designs and typography.

 

Initially it was thought best to keep the paint job on the furniture simple;the worry being that by using anything other than a single complimentary flat colour could possibly detract from the book covers colours and design. 

HK Arts colour consultation began with around 8 carefully chosen colours that we thought would both sit well in the room and also form a good background colour to display the books and their glorious covers.

However,after some deliberation the clients presented me with a piece of fabric that had caught their eye and asked to see if I could come up with a colour and paint finish that looked similar. You can see in the picture below the fabric and HK Arts colour swatches and workings out.

With request from the clients Jacob designed and built the bookcase as a modular piece made up of 3 seperate units for ease, incase of a future house move. Here's the last shelf going in!

.....and complete with the book collection.

You may just be able to see in the close up pictures below that there is a slight grain to the tulip wood which ultimately I think adds quality and character overall. Much nicer than MDF!

And lastly a big thankyou to Jacob Littlejones for the use of his lovely workshop for this project. He also blogged about it here http://www.jacoblittlejones.co.uk/blog/project-bookcase-1 

Mural Restoration

This project was a blast from the past! HK Art was commissioned to paint this mural for a bank in London Wall 10 years ago. The bank has recently relocated to a central London premises and wanted to bring along the mural from their old offices. I felt really touched actually, that the clients had become so attached to the mural that they were bothering to try and save it. Often things like this in a major office refurbishment would have landed on the skip!

The original mural had been painted on 8 x 4 plasterboard sheets that had been jointed and mounted onto a free standing wall. To bring the mural to the new premises it had to be taken off its wall and reduced in size by around 1.5 metres which meant cutting it into 5 pieces;quite an undertaking for the builders apparently!

At the central London office it was remounted to a new wall ready for HK Art to repair. It was in quite a sorry state when I first visited site.

The individual plaster boards hadn't been mounted flush to each other due to the uneven surface on their reverse side so this presented a tricky filling and sanding job in the first instance. Once all jointing scrim had been cut back it revealed jagged and broken raw edges of plasterboard. The joints had to be peeled back to around 20mm wide and filled in with a combination of small pieces of plaster board,easi fill jointing compound,painters flexible caulk,and finished with a troupret fine surface filler, feathering out in various directions to compensate for the uneven way the boards had been mounted.

The newly filled and sanded joints were primed and then the colour matching could begin.

This mural had 5 different shades of tinted paints and glazes to build up the stone effect background alone, the soldiers and rosettes had a further 4 shades to colour match.

The following pictures show the build up of underpainting, blending and re drawing that took place.

 

Two coats of acrylic varnish were applied,rolling on and laying off with a brush and FINISHED!

Restoring/rescuing a picture frame

I had a call from a client who'd recently had their home re designed and re decorated. The last thing to tweak for the new look was a rather nice gilded overmantle mirror. My client had attempted to change the colour of the mirror, from gold to silver with a silver acrylic paint!...and needless to say, was disappointed with the results.

I'm no picture frame restorer per se,but suggested that if we were to use real metallic leaf we could bring the frame back to a more pleasing finish.

Silver leaf would need varnishing as it oxidizes and changes colour over time without a protective coating.Aluminium leaf whilst non tarnishing and easy to use wasn't quite the right colour;too cold and tinny. So it was decided, once samples were shown, to use Palladium leaf which has a really nice subtle greyish tone which would work well with the umber greys of the furnishing fabrics in the house.

I hand mixed a dark umbery,blueish grey for the base colour and applied loose Palladium leaf to the frame and gently rubbed this back to expose some of the underlaying colour and give a slightly aged softened finish. 

See before and after photos below.

 Frame before treatment

Frfame after treatment

Glass Gilded Fanlights of Guernsey

Whilst working in Guernsey I received an enquiry to gild a house number onto the glass of a fanlight back in London. Lucky for me there was a plethora of gilded and sign written fanlights near where I was working. I'd started taking photos of them anyway for my own reference.

With only a few exceptions of nasty cheap vinyl, most were the genuine gilded article or were hand painted onto the reverse side of the glass in sign writers enamels. 

The pictures below are a good selection of different typeface, styles and techniques.

The beginning of the fanlights of Guernsey trail. 

A lovely example.

 Very skilled blended shadow technique. This is very hard to master! 

Reverse painting onto glass with signwriters enamels

This looks like gold paint rather than leaf and is in a poor state.

The signwriting is a bit wonky and the spacing isn't great but theres no doubt the front of this house still looks very smart.

Simple and elegant serif typeface.

An attractive carved detail on someones front door.Nicely painted too!

Back in London.....

This is Toms' house, his "unfinished masterpiece''!

 

He's carefully restoring his Victorian terrace to its original state. Tom is the unofficial, self appointed, one man conservation officer in his area of London. An eccentric, (his words not mine!), hes taken the trouble to distribute a self penned letter around his neighborhood,; a letter calling for all home owners in the surrounding streets to think again before replacing the original doors and windows with UPVC.

I think we need more people like Tom! It was a real pleasure doing this commission.

Here’s the finished glass gilded fanlight by HK Art Projects

This is a great photo courtsey of Andy Marshall. A collection of rather lovely examples of fanlights from the Georgian period http://fotofacade.com/?p=1610

Working in Guernsey August 2010

I was really pleased to be asked by Angel Interiors to work as part of a team of specialist painters for six weeks during the summer of 2010 in Guernsey.I really enjoyed working with fellow paint finishers and gilders; it made a change for me! I hope that I can occasionally subcontract myself out again to other larger specialist decorating firms in the not too distant future.

The Project

An extensive turnkey refurbishment was being carried out on a beautiful Victorian villa which was located on the eastern side of the island.It stood in 35 acres of landscaped gardens overlooking the sea.

All walls and ceilings had been lime plastered and a base coat of dead flat emulsion paint had been applied. All wooden panelling,doors,architraves and skirtings had been painted with an acyrlic eggshell.

Our paint finishing work covered 14 rooms in the main house including the large expanse of 3 floors of staircase and landing walls. We were to produce a subtle aged paint effect to take the newness off the freshly applied base colours.

As a decorative painter I find I get asked alot for aged/distressed/antique paint finishes. However,the real problem with aged and distressed paint finishes is that, too often they can look contrived or themed (and quite frankly, naff!);not a look you'd want in a tastefully decorated home!

The art of good paint finishing I think is to have an eye for such details and nuances; on this particular job we tried to give the most natural and authentic lived in look as we could. What on the face of things seems a relatively simple effect to produce,requires observation and sympathectic handling.

We couldn't use any synthectic acrylic scumble glazes for two reasons; one, the designers didn't want any sheen whatsoever, all surfaces had to be dead flat matt. Its worth mentioning here that any 'dead flat' varnishes,even labelled so, will still give a certain amount of sheen. Last but not least, the other reason,any acrylic coating would render the use of lime plaster pointless.

      Highlighting has started on one half of the rose in the centre. Note the subtle washes on the ceiling bed which has created an undulating effect reminiscent of the appearance of old plaster..    

The effect on the walls was achieved with several layers of different coloured water washes.Two painters laid on the washes with large brushes while the other two painters quickly followed behind padding off with dampened pads of stocknette.   Sampling,debating,and speculating!   

 Distressing some gilding that I'd done on the wall panel moulding. Fabric inserts would be put in later.