The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Furniture Finishing

For large designs it is desirable to make a "pounce." Place the theme to be copied on an ironing board or other flat, padded surface with a piece of rough paper between and pin everything tight to the board with thumb tacks. With a thick needle or pin the outline of the picture is pricked at close intervals until it is reproduced on the paper by a myriad of tiny transparent holes. When applied to the piece of furniture these holes are dusted over with chalk for dark backgrounds and charcoal for light ones. With this done the design is ready to be filled in with colors by hand. For small runs the work can be done more conveniently by tracing the outline on a hard flat surface with architect's tracing paper. The design is then transferred onto the furniture with carbon paper and filled.

The real test of skill naturally enters with the filling-in operation, and here the training obtained in a good school with palette and oil colors is essential. It would be useless, therefore, to attempt here to give the procedure. Where no trained talent is available it is possible to secure effective results with simple one-color shaded designs working always with the original subject before the eye. A good striper could probably turn out very passable work of this kind in a comparatively short time, as a steady hand is one of the prime essentials.

GLAZING AND PROTECTING

Unless the artist is unusually experienced along these lines, it will ordinarily be found that the design when completed is too bold in coloring. To overcome and soften this harshness an antique glaze may be applied by hand as soon as the oil colors are dry, with or apart from any general antique shading of the piece as a whole. Such a glaze is applied heavily to the design, then quickly wiped off, thus leaving on it only enough to accomplish its purpose.

With the advent of lacquer some difficulty was encountered in applying the protective coat over the design in such a way that the powerful paint solvents it contains would not "raise" or crinkle the oil colors. As this occurred, even when the design had been allowed to dry apparently hard, attempts were made by artists to work with japan colors mixed in turpentine and oil and with dry colors mixed in shellac.

Plate LXXV.—Free Hand Painted Louis XVI Chest of Drawers.

But despite the resistance of these mixtures to lacquer, the rapid work rendered necessary with such quick-setting materials gave uneven artistic results. Persistent experimenting eventually revealed that, in nine cases out of ten, by applying either a thin shellac coat or a mist coat of the lacquer, the regular full-bodied lacquer finishing coat could be put on in about an hour with complete safety. The decoration, of course, still had to be set aside long enough to become hard dry, but the delay proves in every way worth while. With varnish no trouble is encountered.