Rococo table 7

 Well, things have changed with the table.  After painstakingly cutting and painting all those shells, I realised they just didn’t work and it struck me I had missed a trick….

Basically, the background colour presented an opportunity in its own right….in that the paint contains plaster, so painting directly onto plaster is either a wonderful way to revisit the past e.g. Frescos, or it’s a null and void sell out to darling acrylics.

Well of course I went for the more difficult option of Frescoes and can I say, what wonderful medium….ghostly and very forgiving!

Rococo table 7

 I tidied up the legs over the weekend, they are almost finished, just one more coat of gold furniture paint needed.  It is much easier to paint them having dismantled the table and if I had done that to start with I would have saved about 4 days.  However I needed to see the table assembled to make final colour choices, so I’m not going to beat myself up about that.

I found a really nice gold foil for the background on Marie A, but it does include the name of the chocolate and some cute embossed tiny horses.  I’m OK with that, because the gold is perfect for my purposes, so that is a ‘fill’ as per the script of Margin Call with Kevin Spacey, which is a film I’ve seen now about 38 times.  

Then I painted the shells about 4 times with 2 golds.  I’m a little concerned they are quite flat looking now and am toying with the idea of making them more 3-d?  I’ll do an experiment and see what happens.  

Apart from all of that, I covered yet more of my boxes lying around the place.  I found it much easier to use a sponge roller to apply the school PVA on both the paper and the surface.  I also watered the PVA down a bit because it was drying super fast.  I think the beaded box looks quite Chinese now, which is Ok but unintentional.  This was because I didn’t quite have enough floral paper and so had to include as protective gold border.  The beads are very clever, they are not beads at all and so there is no snagging threat.  

I need to finish the table this week, because I need to make a start on the chest of drawers.  For that I bought legs from China, which are very well made and fit for purpose.  I worry a lot about these projects before I start them and constantly work on them in my head.  I think the sides of the chest will be aged bronze patina, which is very exciting but if it’s not really enough, sort of thing, I might apply the gold so that it looks like faded gilding, now that’s going to be hard, but not impossible, especially if I use a sponge. 

To quote from Margin Call again “Well you’ve gotta come out of the gates storming, no swaps…”

Rococo table 6

 Hi everyone,

I must admit I have been a little distracted by the gorgeous weather and just how many coats of paint you can apply when working outside.

The other thing that happened was I had a massive, really massive tidy up.  It did me good to find old favourites and become enthused by materials that I stashed with good intentions but neglected ever since.  Then something happened to me, where suddenly a lot of ‘stuff’ that was languishing appeared to me like shimmering oases in the desert, whereby I could see the finished item, at long last.

So after that I took on more and more stuff, boxes, paints, tools everywhere... I’m pleased to say quite a few things have been sorted out.

Ok, so the table is basically finished design-wise.  See photos below.   I painstakingly cut out 11 shells in thin card to paint....you guessed it: gold.  I used my Fiskars knife, which is a wicked little tool and makes me want to make more of these things.  The area between the two circular designs worries me a little, but if I think it needs a bit more work, I’ll just cut out more decoupage characters and stick them on... I have a lot of them!  Painting the finished table with a coat of satin varnish will be interesting, but I’ll use hairspray as a fixative first on the images and hopefully there won’t be any colour runs...

I took the table apart to tidy up the legs and made a third arm to rest them on while drying.

Then I covered a heart shaped box, it’s actually quite large but so lovely to glimpse in a stuffed cupboard.  It’s a gift.  Completing the lid gave me a whole stack of ideas for seascapes and golden sunsets etc.  

The great thing about crepe papering the top was it makes the paper much more durable.  I covered it horizontally because the pink paper which is divine had to be used the same way because I only had one sheet.  The paper looks like embroidered fabric, which is so adorable p.  It cost £2.50 a sheet about 10 years ago from Athena.

Then I painted another box with Rustoleum Pearlescent spray paint, over eggshell. I don’t have a picture of that, but in amongst it all I did an automatic colour drawing of a person that popped into my head.

Then I painted another box with a rose stencil or stamper, again by Rustoleum and decorated yet another box that was housing paints.

Rococo table 5

 Busy busy busy....

Ok so here is the colour of dreams.  It’s Rustoleum’s Belgrave, chalk furniture paint and it is absolutely perfecto.  When wet it is darker than you want, then when it dries it is soooo beautiful.

But, there is always a but.... it is such a vibrant blue, the shells I made looked very wrong for it.  So I decided as I’m trying to suggest mouldings, I would just use thin card.

Then I had to sort out the green stripes I mentioned.  Luckily my Fiskars knife thingy proved to be a very good investment.  So here are the pictures and hope you like them....

Rococo table 4

Well, that’s the last time I say I expect something to be easy.  The stencil at the bottom is the one I’ll use.  It’s not as precise all over as it needs to be, because all I was after was a time-saving device for the relationship between all seven sections radiating from the centre.  I will be hand painting the rest.  Considering I have to paint 16 shells, TG for stencils.  I also made the stencil less symmetrical because Rococo does not use symmetry.  

Ok so the table has changed colour from the green you can see above.  I faithfully copied Italian paint, where they used layers of scrumblimg and then some ochre.  I ended up with this, which was nice but just not peaceful enough for tea in the garden.  So I stripped it and painted it white again with undercoat and will top coat it later today, hopefully.  The final colour is going to be heavenly, durable and a unanimous decision between me and Alwayshungry. 

The shell motif was going well, then it was not.  I couldn’t find my modelling knife and virtually turned the house upside down and inside out trying to find it.  Anyway, it’s all sorted out now. So the shell will be half hand painted and half stencil.  If it doesn’t look as I hope it will, I will re-think that detail.  The main problem I have now is this new colour that the table will be.

Then there is the background green stripes around Marie problem, that has to go.  It occurs to me that I could paint a gold background, which would be so nice, but I’m keeping my mind open on that, as she may need some sky instead?

I coated the stencil in nail varnish to make it waterproof, as I don’t want it to become soggy and limp.

It’s very hot in little England now and that makes we want to tidy up, big time.  I seem to have a lot of miscellaneous items in the wrong places and I’m a person that if I can’t find something in under 05 minutes I start to get very grouchy.  Thank Goodness for plastic crates!

Rococo table - stage 3

Hello eager revampers, 

Not content with the way the design was going I thought the problem was due to the legs but then I realised all roads lead to, and from, the central image of Marie Antoinette.  

While trying to figure out how the top will relate to the legs, I painted the whole thing brown, as a base layer for Wax Resist technique.  Because the table has to look old after it’s painted, I decided to achieve the patina I really will need to bash out about a bit with various implements, not least of all my wire brush.

So after it was painted brown, I then had to about making Marie look more like she was hand painted.  The great thing about inkjet prints is you can move the colour around with water colour paint, applied in thin washes.  Being careful not to get the paper too wet. First I sorted out some colours by using my best pigments, then I toned down the highlights, then I neutralised some colours, then I used a gold pen, then made all the darks darker.  You basically go on like this to try and make it all more 3-d.

Feeling Marie had been sorted out by being made to look less flat and more 3-d, it gave me the idea that the shell design for the outer circle of the top design needs to be painted 3-d too.  I don’t have a problem with 3-d per se, because it incorporates lots of tricks, or illusions.  So I found an image of a period shell but it was too abstract for this piece, but I liked the dimensions.  So I traced around it with a ball end thingy, went over the shape with graphite, and then within this framework I superimposed another image of a shell from my phone.  The thing about Rococo is they abandoned lots of symmetry, so motifs like this are actually easy to repeat because they are forgiving.  The problem of how to fit the shells, that lie on a horizontal axis, within in the circle is not going to be a problem, I hope, because I shall make a template of the whole thing first with baking paper. 

I’m very excited to use massive dollops of gold paint.  To date I have about 4 different gold shades, which will come in handy because I don’t want very much flat gold.  I cannot yet see the fully finished piece in my head because I always wait to see how much I can exploit the materials.  I also want drama and that is always a bit uncertain but very very exciting.  I also must keep within budget....so no more decoupage images!

As I give the table more thought, the more serious this endeavour becomes, which is great because I have a lot of stuff going on at the present time and wrestling with design ideas really takes my mind off the things that are going on in reality.  As Hitchcock once said “No one really wants reality”.  

Rococo table - stage 1

 Ok so work has begun on this little table.  I bought some decoupage images from Etsy and have started to place them and think about what I can do with this piece.  

I decided the colour palette will be from a famous painting of the period.  I also looked at crockery and clocks to give me ideas.  Invariably when you image search you end up with images from the Rococo revival and I don’t want those, nice as they are.

So then, quite by chance I stumbled upon a picture of a Rococo side table photograph by an antique dealer in Amsterdam and then I realised that was the missing piece, in my thinking, as it were, because now I have a patina template to work with.  So now I’m pretty clear as to my layers, under-painting colours and where and how to distress it.  I’m going for wax resist method on the edges and wire brush and sand paper for other bits.   

So I primed the table with Zinsser BIN, which as you know is my go-to paint for revamps and refurbs. The stuff is amazing, but you have to clean your brushes in Methylated Spirits, because of the shellac.

I did two coats of that and painted the underside of each level too.  This was after I washed the table all over with Soda and white vinegar with a dash of washing up liquid.  Then rinse it.  The soda kills any mould or fungus.  Its an old table that I bought at a boot sale for £2.  It’s a mass produced reproduction that was made in China.  I bought it to use in the garden to serve tea and so I’m going with Marie Antoinette ‘Let them eat cake’ loosely speaking, sort of thing.  

So the first couple of images I bought in Ye Olde Etsy were um....duds.  That was a shame because I am on a budget.  However as my ideas progressed I realised how much work was involved and so thought it warranted two more digital downloads.  I thought the images were priced fairly but the taxes seemed steep?

Let’s get back to work....remember people, Adam accepted his fate when he knew he could work....work IS our salvation!

Rococo time

 After doing so much distressed and dark art, I decided to revamp this little table.  

The shape and overall design is really dainty and if I close my eyes I can see it in a Roccoco style with decoupage top, lots of gold paint and adorable pastel colours.  I think I’ll varnish the whole thing and basically ham up tea in the garden.

I decided to do this after I spruced up my wheelbarrow frame, which had become very rusty.  So here is the table and the wheelbarrow.  

The thing I learned about rust is, it’s actually greasy, so once you go at it with a wire brush, then you need to wash it down with brush cleaner, then you paint it with Jenolite Rust Converter.  I really enjoyed working with this product because it’s fast and once it turns the rust black, there is no need to either wash it off or sand it.

The table could take longer than I would like, so I will have to find ways to speed up the process, like making stencils and using lots of masking tape.  

The table is actually jumping the queue around here, which increases the pressure on me, as I need to finish my IKEA revamped chest of drawers, pronto.

Well I must dash - keep working, keep achieving, keep making progress ppl!