The Other Kind of Painting. In the Office. With Stencils.

I'm back to working on the office.  For a while it housed a very special house guest, and so the office got moved into the family room.  This turned the family room into a bit of a mess.  As accustomed as I am to messes, I don't like them to hang around forever.  Spiders (eeee!) like to make nasty little spidery nests in undisturbed, messy areas.  The ick is icky and creepy--a bad combination.

First, I have to finish painting.  I could have opted for plain walls and a plain ceiling--the condition in which it existed as a guest room--but nooOOOoo, I had to start looking through books.  Of course I found a great paint scheme which involved stencils.  I have a laser to help me mark straight lines, so putting stripes on the walls was only somewhat arduous.  

Stripes and stencils?  

It gets better.

Because of course stenciled leaves (I had to pick something with delicate details, naturally) within broad, widely-spaced stripes wouldn't look as nice without some sort of border highlighting the closet and window.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  For now I'm just going to go into that darned office so I can start stenciling the stripes I've got on the wall so far.  I've got about half (maybe more) of the stripes filled with their background so I can put some of the furniture in its proper place.  I only want to do that so that I have room to set up the laser so that I can stripe the rest of the walls, but getting the office furnished even that little bit more will be an added bonus.  I might even go a little crazy and put some books on the shelves.

Clearly, life is one big adventure.  Now, to have at, with paint brushes, sponges, and latex.

A Writer's Process

I don't usually have trouble keeping BIC (butt in chair) but some days ...

Perhaps a writer might decide that the house is becoming too much of a distraction, and some cleaning has to happen. This writer might, then, do the dishes, followed by a carpet steam-cleaning that gets about half the living room damp and the upstairs mostly uninhabitable due to carpet shampoo stench. The downstairs might be even worse, due to slowly decomposing rat nests. The solution? Paint that unattractive, scraped-up section of wall under the window seat RED.

The writer might have some RED paint from a previous paint job. Perhaps her daughter wanted her closet door trimmed in red, and the writer reflects, with a gentle smile on her face, on the fact that the RED paint job looks fabulous to this day. So she could therefore find a partial quart in the laundry room, and take it upstairs. Of course all writers have painter's tape just laying around, rolls and rolls of it from a sale at a hardware store.

(See, packrats aren't all bad.)

It might be, then, that after the writer tapes off the area and pats a little RED paint around on the wall, she will recall that this is a particularly translucent red (Velvet Cake, Miller Paint) and that she'll need some serious painting supplies. So she must merrily go, singing a song, to the hardware store where she will pick up some phosphate-free TSP (the rest can be used on something else, say a deck re-stain) and fancy primer on sale for half off! which she kindly asks to have some red put into it ...

... so that it's PINK.

Sadly, this does not change the fact that rather translucent reds remain translucent and any area she happens to accidentally double touch or add a little extra paint will be noticeably darker than the rest. The writer may contemplate this problem, and decide the only solution is to go to Home Depot where she has a gift card, and get a different RED.

Of course writers who are also watercolor artists can be wise in the ways of RED paint, and so the writer is somewhat likely to select the correct RED, a slightly warmer, opaque red called Red Delicious (Glidden Paint.) Being a writer has its disadvantages, though, because writers often forget to use the gift card and just swipe their debit card.

The result will have no choice but to turn out fabulous. The carpet stench must in time subside from extended drying, and therefore the writer may (the next day) at last breathe a happy sigh and write. Later, she will have the option to remove the painter's tape at her leisure, with the assistance of a very sharp knife.

Sharp knives do come in handy sometimes, as do the DHs who carry them.

Still Painting

If you've ever worked with stencils, then you know.  They seem like such a simple, elegant, easy thing to do.  Everything from conception to cutting them out to execution is simple.  Right?

Of course!  Which is why I decided (shut up, stop laughing at me!) that I could take a stencil from a book about stenciling I got quite some time ago, modify it (I can still hear you laughing) to get rid of the fleur de lis and add ivy leaves (spades if you prefer though I deliberately made the leaf asymmetrical) and lay it out properly.  You see, in the original it wasn't even.  It was wider than it was long, which wasn't a big deal, but when you folded it in half either way, it was crooked.  So I straightened it all out.  It only took, oh, about two hours working with a ruler and a curved edge.  And now I'm in the midst of slicing it out with a razor.  The best part?  I won't be done when I'm finished cutting it out.  No, that's just the beginning.  I have to treat the watercolor paper so that it doesn't absorb too much moisture and warp.  And then I have to actually tape this thing up, stencil it on, move it down to the next marked spot and stencil again.  All the way around the room.  Well, okay, I can skip the wall with the oh-my-gawds-what-were-they-thinking glue-on paneling that's peeling off now.  (I have plans for that wall later.)

Real artists use acetate and a hot acetate cutting thingy to cut out a stencil.  I don't have acetate and a hot acetate cutting thingy, so I'm doing this the old-fashioned way, the way they used to do it before acetate.

Wish me luck.  I'm gonna need it.

Project apace

I'm painting.  There's paint, there's brushes, there's paint pans, there are cats everywhere.  Carey supervised for a while but got bored.  The other cats come and go, mostly when they think they're most likely to get away with shedding hair on a wet wall.  

These are some pics of the crappy first coat.

Actually, the trim has two coats, so it's in the pretty good coat stage.  I don't think a third coat will be necessary.  Trim paint is quite a bit denser than wall paint.  

The other walls will be about the same brightness as they are now, but warmer.  Think pale peach.  In retrospect I probably could have gotten away with a much darker peach, but sometimes we don't learn these kinds of things until we get home.  I can live with pale peach.  Right now they're a cold, grayish white.  Obviously the pic shows the walls as being warmer and more yellow than they actually are.

That teal wall will have IKEA shelves over it eventually so it won't be unrelenting TEAL like it is now.  But I like it dark.  It definitely adds character to the room.

And, for my next trick, I will continue to paint the walls.  It's like magic, only it's slow and messy.  Oh, wait, magic is slow and messy.  NM, it's just like magic.

Paint? Not yet

Today has been prep day for painting (wall kind, not fine art kind.)  I was hoping to get some actual paint on the walls today, but it's almost 1am local time here and I've just finished filling in all the holes in the wall.

I may do some hand-painted details around the room after the regular paint is up, if I'm feeling brave.  Stuff like that is notoriously tricky, so I'm not planning anything really big or dramatic--maybe some leaves around light switches and such.  If I didn't have so many other writing and art projects on my list, I might plan out a trompe l'oeil on the section of wall between the sliding glass door and the big window.  In particular I'd love to do an ivy plant growing out of a Green Man pot with maybe a butterfly on one of the leaves and probably a caterpillar or two.

With those sorts of things it's best to first make a master sketch that you then guard with your life so that if it works out you can use it over and over again.  You transfer the master sketch onto canvas or, preferably, a board painted with the same latex you have painted on the wall as a ground.  You then paint your subject in oils if you have an oil-based paint on the wall or acrylics if it's latex, taking notes and/or pics as you go along.  If you're satisfied with your project, you then transfer the sketch onto the wall and paint it step by step (skipping any errors and making improvements as you can) and then you can sell the painting on the canvas or board.  If it didn't turn out, you shouldn't put it on the wall!  Just paint over the board or canvas and start again.  It's much less aggravating  perfecting your project on a board than making a mistake on the wall, especially since trompe l'oeils are notoriously hard to cover.  It's doable, but you have to treat it just like dark paint on the wall--a couple of coats of primer, and then two or three coats of your wall paint.  Why are they tough to cover?  Because even really good paint is just a wee bit translucent.  With a monocolor on a wall, there may be some of the underlying color showing through your paint, but not enough to notice anything but the most overt change in hue from your paint chip.  When there's a pattern, though, the eye is really good at picking up subtle variations in a monotone and you'll see just that hint of pattern under the paint unless you have enough pigment to cover the pattern so the eye can no longer detect it.

By the way, there's a particularly wonderful Green Man here, though it's not my favorite so far.  My favorite was created by my good friend Roz, and it's hanging on her wall at her house.  I've yet to find one that equals the depth of emotion and expression.

The sickness spreads, and paint geekiness

It's official now.  The girl is sick too.  

I went to the doc yesterday and my lungs are clear (so far) and I don't appear to have secondary infections going on.  So, despite the fact that I'm ill, have an off again, on again fever and sound like I've traded my vocal chords for sandpaper, I can still declare:

My immune system is mighty.  Here me roar!

Actually, you can hear me roar later, after I'm done with the laryngitis thingy.  I'm supposed to rest my voice as much as possible.  Which, btw, for those of you not in the know, whispering is as hard if not harder on your voice than talking.  Don't whisper if you have laryngitis.  Write a note.  Point.  Shake your head no no and point again more firmly.  That.  That right there.  Yes!  No, not that, that.  Oh, I give up, I'll get it myself.

In painting news I plan to get some new paints.  I've been working with the same palette for a long time (well, about four years which is not that long I guess) and, although I'm sure there's much more to learn about these colors, I've learned to trust their properties, how they mix,and I know how they lay beside each other.  It's time for some new colors to shake things up.

My 'normal' palette is primarily composed of Schmincke aquarelles (watercolors) with some M. Grahams.  I use vanadium yellow, gamboge, vermillion, cadmium red, madder red dark, quinacridone violet, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue and viridian as my 'primary' colors and yellow ochre, raw sienna, raw umber, and Hooker's green as my 'earth' colors.  My earth palette is pathetically limited and I can't paint with it in a functional manner.  Although I don't have black or gray I haven't missed them.  I mix them.

Anyway, I went to Art's Desire to snoop around.  I was almost out of quincridone violet and viridian so I picked up a tube of each (all of these are in M. Grahams, a local company, which I'm moving over to away from Schmincke) and I got pthalocyanine green because it looked useful to me.  I'd also been thinking about how prussian blue would fit into my earth palette, and since it was right there ....  After some hemming and hawing I also picked up burnt umber, a nice, red-leaning brown.  

For 'normal' colors I'd like to add new gamboge because as a yellow it has more range and interest than regular gamboge.  I'm also picking up perylene green, which, I admit, may make me lazy about mixing my blacks.  I'm probably going to phase out Hunter's green.  Although Hunter's is an artist's standard, it hasn't been very useful to me with my current palette and when I dip into it as a straight color or for mixing I'm usually disappointed with how flat it is.  With the new additions I may change my mind.  I have until the end of the tube to decide.  For now, though, it's on the 'need not restock' list.  I also at some point picked up chrome yellow.  I never use the darned thing.  What was I thinking?  

But the colors I'm really excited about are the Daniel Smith Primateks.  These so-called mineral colors show a lot of promise.  This overview on Handprint discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of these colors.  One negative for Handprint is a positive for me--I paint very dark, and so the dark nature of the mineral hues will serve to my advantage.  I'm also excited to see how the precipitation will work on yupo.  Will it do too much?  Behave itself?  Go wild?  Disappoint?  Can't wait to try.  My choices are blue apatite, sodalite, piemontite and bloodstone.  With these colors, I think my earth palette will become at least as fun to play with as my primary palette.  I can expand as an artist and play with some grown up colors.  

One thing is certain.  My normal palette (the actual palette rather than the colors I have) is too small.  Either that or I have to break down and get a second one, separating the earth from the primaries.  I can no longer foist my earth colors into mixing pockets.  I'll need all the mixing pockets now.  Interestingly enough, although I hadn't planned on it, I'll end up with ten primary colors (replacing gamboge with new gamboge) and twelve earth colors (if prussian blue works out in that palette--it may end up fitting better with the primaries.)  This will be the first time I'll have more colors in the earth palette than the primary.  I think it will work really well with the subject matter I choose, but I won't know until I get there.  

So today I'll paint some with what I have and see what happens.  First thing, got to do some paint swatches and see where I'm at, and then it's onward and forward from there.