Tape and paint ! Upcycle the perfect triangle …

I will be running a full week end of up-cycling furniture in the lovely House for an Art Lover on the 22/23rd of July. for booking look here we have a few spaces left… but hurry they are going fast !

This season, my group of up-cyclers have been experimenting for their furniture with geometrical shapes and bright colours creating patchworks of triangles and squares, and vertical lines. This is a simple yet very effective way of decorating a piece of furniture. Its simple and effective and easy to set up. Below are three examples of realisation by some pupils from this year’s group.

Sula’s chest is below, this is a discarded piece of inexpensive pine furniture which almost found its way to the skip. Sula brought it in … just to practice on and finished it today by decorating it with bold triangles of blue, greys and yellow. The design was created by stretching long stretches of masking tape in various directions creating triangles of different angles and sizes. A very quick and simple way to decorate.

Rosie spent the first several weeks of the course preparing and priming her piece, a chest of heavy pine. Many difficulties on the way with a heavy grain in the wood, load of sanding and buffing over the past few weeks, getting the piece ready to be decorated.

An ensemble of triangles of different colours in a chalky paint, contrasting in an organised manner. Today Rosie added some gold triangles, a “home made” paint made of metallic powder mixed with Shellac, creating a vibrant contrast. This is an alternative to the difficult to handle “gold” leaf.

The result is striking, only one thing to do now… protecting it with a clear lacquer ! Well done such a good result.

Maureen worked for the past few weeks with two chairs she purchased for the whole of £10 second hand… she did apply a lot of energy into preparing them, covering the bad wood with layers upon layers of priming then applying a cinnamon colour as a background. Today she has started the final stage of the decorative process, lining tape to create a large band of coloured lines all in shades of spices, cinnamon, and others, the final stage will be to apply a stencil of a circular yet striking motif on the seats. Almost there, but very impressive skills in lining up very vertical lines of tape can be tricky and Maureen did very well today in setting up the scene. I am looking forward to see the final stage next week.

That reminds me about last term when Candice finalised her last piece by taping across the front of her chest of drawer some vertical bands of very striking colours. The technical difficulty here off course is to make sure that all the lines are completely vertical and match… I think the result was very stylish dont you? what a great result for a piece purchased out of charity shop for around £20.

So may be you feel you would like to have a go at transforming an old piece of furniture into something special just using standard paint… you could book yourself onto one of my up-cycling classes in Glasgow. My next week end course is on the 22/23 july at the House for and Art Lover for info look Here.