With moving work e-mail and calendaring to Google Apps, it's become a lot easier to work in the study at home, and I've been spending more time here. One of my favorite work breaks to to keep plugging away at the study ceiling.
I have almost finished the second phase of work, which consists of adding a parapet or dado at the base of the ribs, with recessed paneling. To see the difference, compare the picture to the left
(before) with the picture above (after). What you'll see that's new is the parapet running just above the bookcases. To the left below is a detail of the dado wrapped around the base of one of the recessed columns.
(I specifically copied the boxes from the railings around my mother's house).
I particularly like the one over the fireplace, where I did three panels to match the paneling over the fireplace.
Today was also a red-letter day as during one of the breaks I started on the next phase, which is adding faux bas relief medallions in the new recessed panels above each of the bookcases with my favorite historical figure for that subject. (You ever get the feeling I think too much? Me either).
I had been planning to start with Thomas Jefferson over the American History stack, but I happened to run the picture of Admiral Nimitz (for the Naval History stack) through the photo editing process in Picasa and he came out far easier to do in four shades than the Rembrandt Peale of Jefferson I have been working with, so I skipped the practice on the pine board and went straight to translating a print of the photo onto the ceiling.
First step, as I mentioned, is taking the original picture, and in this case changing it to black & white, boosting the contrast, and converting it to a four shade basically "paint by numbers" image.
I then created a grid on the picture and a corresponding grid on the wall and during breaks while working on, well, work (after all, it is the Labor Day weekend) , I added the four colors, going back and forth between the colors as I learned which paint brushes worked best for which parts. I also changed a couple of the colors as I went, as the relative contrast didn't look quite right, and I expect to keep changing it as I work my way around the room.
Finally I added the name below, and here's a
before (with workshop door open, I now realize) and after
of the naval history stack with Admiral Nimitz glowering down from on high.
No one will mistake me for an artist, certainly, but it adds a little more texture to the ceiling, and certainly a lot more personality! And with it being at least six feet away, and barely six inches wide, it can get away with a lot of artistic inadequacies, but it seems to be doing what I wanted, which is adding more detail and texture to the ceiling.
The next candidate, as time permits, is Mr. Jefferson, and after that Constantine XI Palaeologus for the world history stack (last Byzantine emperor, thanks for asking), and eventually Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrea Palladio for landscape architecture and architecture, respectively. Fiction looks like J.R.R. Tolkien, theology Pope John Paul II, Cowboys Tom Landry (yes, it's a stack as well, and I am from the school of thought that Coach Landry's the greatest Cowboy of them all), and I'm still undecided on military history and science fiction (two categories you'd think I'd have strong feelings about), as well as music and film. And even with those filled, I still have twelve more panels that will eventually have medallions, once I figure out what "subject" the medallion should be for them. But even the blank medallions look really good, I realized when I started drawing them today.
But I expect, actually, to start on the clouds for the skylight next, since that's a far more glaring gap than unpopulated medallions. Just depends on how many breaks I need tomorrow...