Painting walls, not pictures

We've been in this house ten months now and it's time to start tarting the old girl up.  We have jokingly given the house a name - Turd Hall (or Tird Hall for posher spelling) as with two cats and a dog there is a lot of shit to pick up! Also as I get the shits with work quite a lot it's appropriate. But I digress…

So the tarting has commenced.

Firstly I had a painter - delectable Daniel, so cute I could almost eat him - do the outside woodwork around the windows.

Inspired by Daniel, who made the woodwork absolutely sing, I decided to paint the inside window trim in the living room and re-lacquer the windowsills because it looked so bloody disgusting compared to the outside woodwork. It took me a weekend and got me back into the swing of painting. I realise I am going about this upside down as the ceilings should come first, then the walls, then the trim, but oh well!!

Ready to go!

Done!

I also repainted the inside front door jamb after spending a couple of weeks mucking around with Plastic Wood and sandpaper restoring a section which had been thoroughly chewed by a friend's dog (hate to think of the splinters the poor dog must have got in her mouth!). It's not absolutely perfect - which is annoying to this perfectionist - but on first glance you wouldn't know there had ever been damage. It's not like it was a square piece either, there was a little recessed bit I had to match. I am considering becoming a sculptor using Plastic Wood as my medium!

Job done  - just have to pull the tape off.

After the delectable smell of oil enamel and turps had faded, I got withdrawal symptoms and wanted another nice task. By that stage I'd amassed around 50 colour swatches for the hall, living room and main bedroom. I bought a few sample tins and did some sections here and there on various walls. For a few days there were parts of the hall which looked positively patchwork as I tried them out!

Tird Hall is double brick and the interior walls are cement rendered, so it's a rough surface and interesting, if a bit labour-intensive, to paint over. The nice thing is that because of the surface you can be a bit slapdash with the roller and it won't show in which direction you've rolled.

The hall was originally yellow and while I wasn't enamoured of it, plenty of farting around with colours brought me back to yellow, but a lighter and more citron shade. The hall is pretty dark so needed a light and warm colour. I don't do cream. I did try with some cream sample paint but I rebelled against it. It's just not me.

I dithered about waiting until we'd had the ceiling painted, but then I thought: I'm a mucky pup when it comes to painting around cornices. I'll be really cross if I get paint from the walls on newly-painted cornices. I can easily touch up the wall for any paint spatters from the ceiling.

Before. The paint looked tired, it had worn away around the light switch, it had scuff marks that wouldn't shift and it was plainly dingy.

So I got the blue painter's tape out and got taping around door jambs, cupboards and skirting in the hall. It took me a roll and a half to do the job properly - it's a big t-shaped hall. I thought, "It's not a huge painting job - there are plenty of cupboards taking up space." Well. The first coat and a bit of the second to use up the paint in the roller tray took me eight straight hours. I didn't even stop for lunch as I was getting a bit tired by then and thought if I stopped, I'd STOP.  My arms were a bit sore at the end of the day and I was getting blisters from the roller handle.

After. You can see there's a slight citron tinge to the yellow.

Nonetheless, it looked great. And the good news is it only took me four hours to complete the second coat the next day. I was on a roller - er, roll - by then.  When I peeled away the tape there was very little paint where there shouldn't have been paint and the carpets didn't get a single drop on them. Phew.

My paint job was very neat - but my clothes weren't by the end of it!

Last weekend's project was the woodwork around the exterior of the front door - undercoat and two coats of glossy white enamel. The paint was original, i.e. 1960 vintage! And it looked it. It was peeling here and there where it hadn't yellowed. Now it's all shiny white again. Have to figure out how to repair the door sill though; it's falling apart.

What's next? Paint the screen door at the front its old original glossy black, as well as the matching grilles which go in front of the windows on either side. I've sanded the grilles ready for undercoat but have to sand and rustproof the front door.  I won't get the opportunity to pick up a brush this weekend though, dammit!!! We have too many social activities planned. Hmmph!!

Colour my world - or at least my mid-century house

This place is dingy. Seriously. A number of the walls are still proudly bearing their original 1960 paint job and while the paint is clinging happily on the internal walls with no sign of peeling, 54 years of wear and tear means there are places I just can't get clean, no matter how much sugar soap I apply. Paint has worn away near the light switches and the poor old place just looks a little underloved.

It's worse outside. The house is red brick, which is a blessing as the walls don't need painting. However all the north-facing windows have peeling paint to an embarrassing extent. Until now we haven't been able to do much about it as we have been saving - or at least G has - for the paint job.

I had a painter out today and if I may digress for a moment, my God he was cute! Dark eyes, dark hair; he had the look of a guy I had a crush on in my teens - a jockey, but he was taller. If I was younger I'd be tempted to try a Mrs Robinson. On looks alone he had the potential to pull me back from my current asexual status (digressing even more, I have been both sexual and asexual during different times in my life). He knew his stuff, too. We chatted about paints and techniques and paint additives, la la la…

So now I'm awaiting his quotes. Three quotes. One for outside, one for the ceilings and stairwell inside, and one for the internal walls in some of the rooms/hall. I'm capable of doing the internal walls myself but a) he'll do a nicer job and leave less mess on the carpets and everything else and b) because I feel obliged to answer every phone call and email I get, I doubt I'll have the time. There are lots of walls. Depending on the price I may have to pull the plug on the internet and put the phone on silent for a few days.

He left me with some colour charts to whet my appetite, and duly whetted it is. I have found colours that more or less match the original 1960 colours in the living room and our bedroom. The living room is the old colour Chartreuse (pale yellowy green) on three walls with an aqua feature wall. It rocks. I'm keeping the colour scheme as it suits the house and looks wonderful with the big stone fireplace. The bedroom is a pale ice green and I'm repainting in a very close colour as it's restful and brings the garden inside.

Our hall and stairway are currently yellow and I'm going for a lighter version as it's dark in the hallway. I'm hoping the colour I've chosen won't turn out looking cream as I detest cream walls. Too 'reproduction fuddy duddy' for me - makes me think of people with reproduction Chippendale antiques and uncomfortable chairs topped with antimacassars. And… too much like the cheap neutral colour you get in rental properties which looks 'dirty' very quickly. The British equivalent is a colour called 'Magnolia'.

The second bedroom was originally pale pink and repainted yellow in 1974. I'm sticking with a yellow as it's on the south side of the house and needs a bright, warm colour. The 50s colour palette was pretty well out there - yellow was a popular colour.

My office originally had pale-ish pink walls too but got a coat of white in the 70s. I like the white. This is a small, dark room and needs light, lovely walls. I'm choosing a variant of white. Not terribly 50s but I need the brightness.

The laundry has yellow walls the same as the hall, and they look odd with grey floor tiles and deep aqua (Amulet Blue as I recall, or Apmat Blue as my Dad used to call them, after a famous pacer of the day) wall tiles. I've chosen a white with a hint of grey/green which will look much fresher.

The bathroom and loo originally had pink walls (Mum LOVED pale pink. I don't) which Mum and I repainted in the late 80s/early 90s in a colour called Beige Shroud. Yup. Ugly name. The colour isn't fab either but we wanted to move from the pink which looked too dark in the room. You still get a hint of pink through two layers of Beige Shroud. That pink doesn't give up a fight easily. Beige Shroud is going though. I'm not heading back to pink but have found an interesting shade of pale green with a hint of mushroom grey called China White by Dulux which will complement the tiles better and look just cracking. It's not dissimilar to some of the colours from a 50s palette. I'll be painting the loo and bathroom myself.

So that's it. The kitchen is fine as I repainted it in the original blue and white 12 years ago and the paint looks fine. I'll redo the white oil enamel on the cupboard doors as they could do with a lift but the walls are fine.

Our plan is to get the outside stuff done this year. Depending on the quotes we may then get Daniel - Daniel….Daniel… those eyes! - to do the ceilings before Christmas too. It's exciting. And I think this house will appreciate the time and money spent on it.

And I suspect that next time I visit a psychic I'll get a message that Mum is relieved I have painted the outside woodwork!

A painterly weekend to myself

I have deliciously sore muscles in my legs, back and arms from weeding my Mum's lawn on Saturday morning. She has a weeding device which is supposed to pull dandelions out easily without you having to bend down, but some of her dandies were too well-established so I was bending and pulling and yanking for an hour and a half in the spring sunshine, until I felt too sweaty, my hair dripping with salty sweat, and too thirsty too. I'm surprised my muscles aren't complaining more, but then I do try and do stretches most days (when I think of it).

Last weekend was a computer-free weekend aside from social media updates and chatting online with some friends. And oh boy, was it good!  G was away until last night so I had the luxury of a weekend to myself with my own company and no interruptions.

After I'd done the lawn I did some cleaning at Mum's house then came home and got stuck into more drawings. I had a scene in mind of the view from Mum's house, across the river to the great school which graces the top of the hill on the other side. It would be the view from my childhood, before the trees grew and obscured most of the building.

I also tried a scene from Paris. I had taken a photo of a languid Parisian girl with a red-lipped, bored face toiling up the steps at Montmartre, and decided it would make a funky landscape with the buildings leaning in and out, and the curves of the handrail exaggerated.

I got stuck in.

My paintings didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped, so late in the afternoon I gave up and treated them as drafts. I was tired though - I draw/paint standing up and I'd been on my feet most of the day. After a hot bath I sank gratefully into bed at 9.30. This is the time that 20 years ago I'd be setting out for the evening - how times change!

On Sunday, after getting a couple of loads of washing out on the line and cleaning the house, I brought out the pastels again.

The second attempt at Mum's view was better, but I think I buggered up one of the jacaranda trees I'd placed in the foreground. Now I definitely know what I'm doing with that scene; one more attempt should see it as I intend it to be.

My sulky Parisian girl turned out better, too. On Saturday I'd painted her with too subdued a palette. This time I went mad on gold and oranges, taking the soft sandstone and hyping it up into summer colours. I'm much happier with the result.

These two paintings are both the same size: 9" x 5" (don't ask me what that is in centimetres, I can work it out... eventually!). This is specific as there is a class in an art show I have entered in the past in which all the entries must be that size. They can be any media or subject. This dates back to the Heidelberg School in the early 1900s who held an art show where all the paintings were that size.  The art show isn't until next May but heaven knows I need some practice!

I'm buoyed up as my nudey rudey and Parisian building both made it into the art show in the area I'm living in at the moment. I'll be going to the opening this Friday night. I'm stunned and delighted as I really didn't expect to make the cut, I'm so out of practice.

So now all I want to do is draw and paint. Work is an invasion when my fingers are itching to grab hold of a pastel!

G is home again so that intrudes on my creative space a bit, particularly in the evenings when it's my only real chance to paint during the week. But don't knock the muse, never knock the muse...

Nudey Rudey's off to the show

This morning I'll be dropping off two paintings to the local art show. The Paris landscape I painted several weeks ago, and...er... a nude. Of me.

Shit that sounds pretentious! As if I stood in front of a mirror painting myself and admiring my boobs or something.

But no, I set up a tasteful self-portrait in the apartment in which we stayed in Paris. In the living room was a sofa with a throw over the back which was a tapestry of a Gainsborough portrait. I lay on the sofa in the same pose as the naked lady in the tapestry, as a kind of joke.

I don't as a rule take nude photos of myself. I don't have the bod any more; although the extra curves are probably artist model materials these days! But I was surprised when I looked at the back of my camera afterwards. The photo was artistic, not slutty or sleazy. I knew at that point I'd try and make a painting/drawing of it.

The resulting painting - technically a drawing as it's oil pastels but the pastels are so thick on the paper it's just about a painting - is 6 inches by 6 inches. I might be willing to put a nudey rudey of me on paper but not on a large scale!

Here it is:

Not only is it my first nude but the first time I've painted or drawn a human as the key focus of a painting. I usually do landscapes and still life. Or my cats. I have a great portrait of Hamish MacFlea which is life-sized and captures him perfectly, but I haven't tried capturing the human soul.

Here's the one of Hamish, although it's not going in the show.

I painted this for myself and my Mum; it's not something that's going to sell anyway. I did this one about 7 years ago, when I decided to start drawing again after many years.

So here I am, feeling nervous about putting these two paintings in the show, hoping like hell they get selected for hanging, hoping they sell and hoping they don't as I'm rather attached to them (which is why I will never become a cat breeder, you can sense the Crazy Cat Lady aspect of it from here, can't you?). I doubt they will win any prizes as the competition will be super-fierce - it's a big show - but if I don't try, I'll never know. 

If the paintings don't get selected for the main show I have ticked the box to allow them to be selected for the Salon des Refuses, for paintings that didn't make the main cut. It may sound loserish, but it isn't. It gives them another chance at getting a gong and/or a sale. 

I'll know in a couple of weeks if they have been selected for either show, or whether I will be taking them home (and putting them in the Hunters Hill Art Show next year!)

When you just need fifty shades of grey.

Bonkbusters leave me cold. If I read a sex-and-shopping novel I find the shopping more interesting than the sex. In fact reading any novel I'm likely to skim over the sex bits, muttering, "Oh, get on with the plot!"

So I'm not likely to grab a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, the mummy porn book with record-breaking sales that has been described by the unkind as having the plot and literary style of Twilight with S&M thrown in. Needless to say I didn't read Twilight either. I had two reviews of it, one from a friend's vacuous teenage daughter who had re-read her copy so often it had fallen apart and could only bubble with incoherent delight and a lot of 'like's about the characters, and a snort of disgust from my intellectual stepson who said it was a poorly-written bit of fluff that set women's lib back fifty years.

But I do have a need for fifty shades of grey.

Or at least more than five.

I'm getting back into painting and drawing, and treated myself to a set of oil pastels last Monday. I've been using soft pastels and after chatting with some artist friends decided to give oil pastels a try. Soft pastels are great fun, amazingly messy, vividly coloured, but they do tend to smudge at the slightest touch and need fixatives. Too much fixative changes their colours, which is exceedingly annoying. Having just got back from holiday and into drawing scenes from Paris with soft pastels, my first few efforts, while not fab as I'm out of practice, were ruined by fixatives.

So. The oils. Great. They only smudge when you want them to. Realistically they don't need fixatives either, which is a huge bonus. But in drawing urban scenes, I found one thing lacking. A pale enough grey. I'd taken the precaution of buying extra greys as well as the set of 48, knowing I would need them. But it's hard to find one that's just a smudge darker than white, that colour that is just perfect for highlights, for sunshine falling on asphalt.

The beauty of oil pastels is that they blend like oil paints, you can smudge and blend and coerce, and use turpentine on them too if you want to meld and blur and blend. So yes, I could blend white with a darker grey, and did. But still... there is that particular pale shade I'm still searching for and that doesn't appear to exist across the major, well-made brands of pastel.

That aside, the first drawing I did with my oil pastels surprised me. I did it in three hours on Monday night (I am an impatient git), and was delighted at the workability of the pastels themselves. I am using Caran D'Ache pastels as research told me they are the softest and easiest to blend; their range of 96 colours is pretty good too.

Suddenly I got my groove back. My drawing turned out as I intended it to in terms of colour, composition and crispness. I'm happy with this.

And now you can see why I need fifty shades of grey!