Decorative ceiling, dressing room

Here's a project I loved working on.

This was without doubt the most extravagant home I have ever seen. That could mean anything really, but in this case it meant tastefully decorated and elegantly proportioned, with an unlimited budget. Every day I worked there I just shook my head when I looked at the craftsmanship on display. A real highpoint for me.

In this case, I gave the designer a price for what he asked for; a coffered ceiling. As I was looking through my books I came across this next image. It's from Queen Charlotte's dressing room from Rosersberg palace, designed by Gustaf af Sillén. I thought that the Neoclassical Pompeiian decoration might be a good fit, and he went for it.

I kind of came to regret that, because it was a whole lot more work than I had anticipated. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut, oh well!

First I had to adjust my image so that it worked for a squared-off dome.

I made a paper template on-site of each surface. Using Photoshop I isolated one section of the original design, then re-configured and designed it to fit the new shorter ceiling and squared top edge. I used that as a guide to paint a full section as a sample. I then went back into Photoshop, repeated and skewed it to fit my paper template. Here are a couple of my rough Photoshop drawings...

Once I had Photoshop layouts for each side of the ceiling, I printed them out small and used an overhead projector to cast their image onto sheets of canvas, which I had hung and base-coated on my studio walls. Then I set about hand-painting each side, step-and-repeat. Simple!

I probably could have created the entire job in Photoshop, since with my other company, Decorative Imaging, I had been experimenting with digitally created and printed decoration, but the designer wanted it to be painted. Besides, the measurements called for a lot of hand re-touching on site.

Here's a shot of the finished ceiling, which I installed. The thin green foliated border on the top edge was a separate piece, as was the bottom border. Once all the canvases were installed I over-glazed the whole thing lightly, and then added the shadows to create the tented pillowing effect.