Working on the walls

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Entry posted by hydroped August 8, 2006

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In my last Blog entry I showed the interior of the Orchid I'm working on. I was really getting frustrated with the exterior and a bit ashamed to say that I'm not doing so well with the paperclay. The front seemed to do alright but I thought I was impressing the lines too far through the clay because that's where it was cracking and seperating - easy enough to fill but when I got to one end of the building I thought Aha - I'll be smarter and make much lighter lines, no one will notice it since it's on the end and it won't crack so badly... wrong! Here's what happened when I used lighter morter lines.

Instead of cracking at the mortar lines like the front had the worst splits here were random and ran right through alot of the brick work. When it had cracked before it was fairly even but this is really ugly looking. I'm sure I'll be able to patch it but getting up in the morning to find this was disheartening.

I had said in my last post that I really didn't like the way the big block work looked from the inside so I decided to go with a plaster look on the inside. I used a pre-mixed spackling compound and mixed a little acrylic craft paint with it to take off the white edge. I used a color called Wild Rice which is a really light sort of tan color. It mixed in really well and I used some cheap paint sponges to apply it directly to the wall. I found a dry paint sponge worked best and just a little finger pressure to get it to stick to the wood grain. It went on really easy. Then once it was applied I went back with a wet sponge which I cut notches out of to take off some of the rough texture and try to get the plaster too look hand applied and in scale. The texture is a little heavy still for the right scale but I'll let it dry up a bit and hit it again lightly wth the water on the textured sponge.

Here's the texture sponge I cut. I used a 1" paint sponge I used a pair of regular scissors to cut 2 small sections out of the sponge leaving 3 "fingers" to texture the plaster effect with

And now two last photos for the day. The interior full plastered - which I like much better and a first glimpse of my bent wood for the arches. They're definitely holding the bend now.. I just wish I'd made the arc a bit more severe but I had no idea the wood could take more bend than that but it clearly will with the right persuasion :lol:

I also worked on some stained glass windows today but once again I ran into failure. The clear over head projector sheets I have are slick on both sides and even after several hours the ink on them did not dry. On the other hand if I ever need to print a pattern on tissue paper I've found that you can lay the tissue paper over the printed sheet press smoothly and the image transfers great! .. I'm not sure why I'd be wantint to print on tissue paper.. but if you ever need to this works :o Tomorrow I'm off in search of artists fixative to spray the transparencies before they go through the printer.. may not work but it's the easiest of the two ideas I came up with for making my faux stained glass windows. The second involves strips of gallery glass leading, a ruler an X-acto knife, a very straight eye and a steady hand. We'll see which method I end up using. Right now the house feels like it's going very very slowly but I have to say I'm learning TONS that I never would have tried otherwise so even though it's slow going it's a great learning process.