Designing with Light: Gilding a Wall

Tags

aluminum leaf, decorative painting, gilding, glazing, interior design

I’ve been working on my dining nook for a while now, trying to bring it all together. It’s not much of a space: about five feet wide and twelve feet long, basically a glorified hallway between the front and back of the apartment. I decided to gild the wall with aluminum leaf.

Why gild at all? It’s slow, smelly and incredibly messy. Here’s why: because it’s amazing what a difference a reflective surface can make. Plus it’s really fun!

This is the darkest corner of the apartment. It gets eastern light in the morning, and once the sun moves, gloom descends. So I have to put something reflective on the wall to bring in light, and I’m not a big mirror gal. And the wall is a workable size, about 4 feet tall, manageable by myself.

Here’s what I started with, a freshly installed banquette bench with cabinetry and a very white wall.

First step, prep: protect everything with plastic, tape out the wall with low-tack tape, then base coat in an oil-based light grey, similar to the tone of the aluminum leaf.

The trickiest part of gilding is staying level and square. Drawing parallel lines on the surface with a sharpie lets me know where the leaf should go. The lines are 6 inches apart because that’s the width of the leaf.

The leaf is stuck to the wall using oil size, a type of glue. The size is rolled on with a regular paint roller, then brushed out with a natural bristle brush. It has to come up to the correct tack before the leaf can be applied, which takes about 90 minutes, depending on how much it’s been diluted. The surface is workable for several hours.

I’m using rolls of ribbon leaf, cut into sections five squares wide. Gilding with individual leaves would take forever; this makes the job much easier and creates better results.

And then it’s time to start gilding, from bottom to top and right to left. From the bottom so leaf doesn’t fall onto the sized surface, and from the right because mistakes will be made at the beginning.

Each leaf overlaps the next one by 1/8 of an inch. So when the wall is done, all of that overlap is fluttering in the breeze.

Once the wall has dried overnight, the overlap is cleaned off with a soft brush, which creates a huge mess, tiny bits of leaf floating off in all directions. Below is the completed wall. As the photos above progress, you can see the light leaving the room as the morning sun moves to the south.

I turned off the lights to show how much the leaf reflects indirect light.

So here we are with everything back in place.

Tons of light, right? And the wall changes as the light changes. What a difference. But I’m not done; aluminum looks very cold and hard, and I don’t want the dining nook to feel chilly. The wall needs an overglaze to knock back the reflection and warm it up.

To coordinate with the green in the bench cushions, I mixed a dirty green. Green is one of those colors that can read as cold or warm, depending on what it’s next to, since it’s a mix of blue and yellow, cold and warm.

The glaze is made with Windsor and Newton Liquin mixed with tube oil colors. Liquin is an oil-based medium used to speed drying time, and it’s the only medium I know that stays translucent over gilding. The glaze is applied with a chip brush and gently pounced with cheesecloth to give it a bit of texture.

Even though the green seems really strong as it goes on, it ends up looking subtle. The refection of the leaf is no longer glaring, although it still softly reflects, the tone is warmer and now the wall is visually integrated with the dining nook’s palette.

A couple of shots of the finished wall with the lights off in the late afternoon. The light from the window across the room now bounces off of the leaf.

And with the lights on.

Before and after. Still waiting for my light fixture to arrive.

The table is custom made and I love it. That’s a story for another day!

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: From Brass to Silver

Tags

aluminum leaf, decorative painting, faux finish, gilding, glazing, interior design, metal leafing, silver leaf

An interior designer recently asked me to gild a mirror frame. The frame was brass, and he wanted a silver leafed frame instead. I suggested switching the leaf to aluminum because silver tarnishes in unpredictable ways, even after varnishing. The frame would look like silver leaf, without the headaches. He agreed, and we were good to go.

Here’s the original mirror frame. The mirror was 33 inches high and 22 inches wide (84 cm x 56 cm). My cat, Little Roo, couldn’t resist investigating.

Step One: The Prep
In any painting or gilding project, prep is your friend. The better your prep, the less clean up you’ll have to do when you’re done, and the quicker the job will go. I taped off the mirror next to the frame using blue low-tack painter’s tape to protect it. The mirror was raised up on four paint cans to bring it off the table, which allowed access to the sides of the frame. The table was protected with a drop cloth.

Step Two: The Size
Gilding begins with sizing. Size is an oil- or water-based type of glue specifically made for gilding. In this case, I used slow-set oil size, which levels out as it dries so you don’t see brush marks. Gilding is usually done over a painted surface. I crossed my fingers that the size would stick to the brass. Luckily, it did.

I mixed the size about 5:1 with mineral spirits. This sped up the drying time of the size, which is usually about 10 hours. Thinned out, it dried to the correct tack in about an hour. I applied it with a half-inch wide natural bristle brush, sizing 5-inch sections at a time, gently blended the size out to the edges and brushed back and forth a few times to blend the last section into the next. I wanted an even coat; no pooling, no missed spots. The size is colorless, so it’s hard to see where it is. It pays to work slowly and to use a light’s reflection to see where you’ve been. Below, you can’t tell what has been sized and what hasn’t.

Step Three: The Tack
The size has to dry to a specific tackiness before gilding can begin. Too wet and the metal leaf won’t dry; too dry and the metal leaf won’t stick. The correct tack is found at the squeak: if you gently drag one of your knuckles along the surface, a gentle squeak will be heard. Too wet and your knuckle gets stuck and mars the surface; too dry and there’s no squeak, although there’s a window of at least an hour when the squeak is right. So don’t go out and start running errands! Stand by, set a timer and wait for the squeak.

Step Four: The Gilding
Luckily, I had a leftover roll of aluminum leaf to work with, which saved the hassle of buying a small amount of leaf. I like to work with rolls, which have individual sheets of leaf laid next to one another, overlapping by 1/8 inch. On the frame, it will look like each leaf has been applied individually, but by using the roll, the process is speeded up. I gilded one side of the frame at a time, cutting the appropriate length of leaf off the roll.

To apply  the leaf, I used a soft brush to gently push it to the surface and stuck it down through the backing paper. It’s important to remember that the oil size below is still wet, and therefore the leaf is now wet and is delicate, so it has to be treated gently. Also, try to avoid touching the leaf; you may leave finger prints. Any cracks or missed spots were filled with little pieces of leaf until the surface was completely covered. Gilding makes a real mess; tiny specks of leaf drift to every corner of the room.

Step Five: The Patch
Somehow, I managed to miss a spot when sizing. No problem, I just applied more size, let it dry for an hour, did the squeak test and applied more leaf.

Step Six: The General Cleanup
Since the surface was delicate, only a general clean up could take place. I removed  the big hanging pieces of leaf and gently brushed off the bigger flakes.

No pressure and no rough handling at this point. The size has to dry overnight before the leaf can be thoroughly cleaned. There’s still a lot of extra leaf on the frame.

Step Seven: The Final Cleanup
The frame has dried overnight and it’s time for the real cleaning. Using soft cheesecloth and a soft brush, I wiped and brushed the surface until all of the remaining bits and pieces of leaf fell away.

Although the leaf was now properly adhered, I didn’t want to scratch it, so I still handled everything with care. Once I was done, I took off the tape and cleaned up the inner edge, then taped the mirror again for glazing.

Step Eight: The Glaze
The designer wanted a soft aging glaze to cut down the brightness of the aluminum, which is glaringly reflective when fresh, but he didn’t want the frame to look dirty. I mixed up a glaze using Windsor & Newton’s Liquin Original, which is an oil medium and the only medium I’ve found that is transparent enough to use as a giaze over gilding. I added in a blob of raw umber from a bottle of universal tint, mixed it up and the glazing began.

The color looked quite dark when mixed, but once applied and manipulated, it was a sheer, light wash of color. I brushed it on with a one-inch wide chip brush, then pounced the surface with cheesecloth, taking most of the glaze off again. Below, the vertical edge is glazed while the horizontal one isn’t. You can see the warmth added by glazing in this color. The glaze gave depth to the frame’s surface without calling attention to itself and reduced the aluminum’s glare.

Step Nine: The Final Product
The mirror dried overnight again, the tape came off, and voila! A new frame. Total time  for the whole process was about six hours. With the glaze, the look of the leaf became softer and it seemed to glow instead of shine.

Here’s a comparison of the original brass, before glazing, and after glazing. I love these jobs! it’s such fun to transform a piece in this way.

Before and After: Faux Oak Door

Tags

decorative painting, faux oak, faux wood, faux wood grain, glazing, oak, painted oak, painted wood, trompe l'oeil, woodgraining

This is a typical painted wood grained door project. In NYC, all exit doors (in this case, a door leading to a stairwell in an office building) are made of fireproof metal. That makes for a lot of ugly doors, so many people choose to paint them. I’m often asked to paint a door as wood to match wood that already exists in the room, although it’s more common in private apartments than in office buildings. In this case, I had to matching the surrounding real oak wainscoting and door frame in the main lobby.

A contractor applied the moldings to the door and painted a pale yellow base color. Then it was my turn. First, I hand-painted all of the figure grain (the squiggly lines) with a small brush, breaking up the lines with a comb. This was the hard part and took the better part of a day. The door surface was vertically divided into three planks that butt together so it looked realistic, since oak trees aren’t big enough to provide a single plank spanning the entire width of a door. This also mimicked the treatment on the adjacent real wood paneling.

The next day, I used a special metal roller about two inches wide called a check roller, which creates choppy dashed lines, intended to imitate the pore structure of oak grain. This was rolled to create vertical pore marks overall. Then I mixed the color for the overglaze and brushed it on. I got the color right on the first try, which was nice. Sometimes it takes two coats to build up the color to a match. Once that was dry, I applied a coat of satin varnish. Voila! Finished door. Total time: about 14 hours.

Here’s my bible when it comes to wood graining and other decorative finishes, “The Art of Faux.” The author, Pierre Finkelstein, offers classes in wood graining and other techniques. His workshops are fantastic.

Another excellent book is Professional Painted Finishes, which was written by the founders of The Finishing School, a decorative painting school in Floral Park, NY, also with great classes.