Hello my dear friends,
You have missed me a month or two. Besides being busy with work and our home I have also had to help taking care of a loved relative who suddenly needed a lot of care. It asked for quite a lot of time, energy and attention, but I am glad to be able to give it. It has meant that my mini time dwindled to almost a stand still, and my time to blog myself, and read your lovely blogs and comment on all your wonderful work grinded to a halt. The blogposts in december were all posts on miniatures I had (almost) finished but had not yet come round to post about.
But I am back. Speaking in the past tens just now does not mean that my relative has died. luckely not! No he made a full recovery and no longer needs the extra care. So there will be time for miniatures and blogland again. I look forward to catching up on reading what you have all been doing these last months.
And soon, but that will be the subject of my next post, my first miniature room will be published in a dutch dollshouse magazin! I am thrilled about that too.
To show you that I have done some mini work in a stolen half hour here and there I want to show you this table. This side table belongs to a good miniature friend of mine. It is made of resin (I think Chinese) and was of a solid greyish gold colour as you can see below. In this picture the table top was already given it's black base coat by me.
The table is solid cast but it hase a good shape. But she despised the cheap gold colour. I offered to marble top and gilt the the rest to improve its looks for her.
For the tabletop I first painted the resin top shiny black. Then I mixed a medium to light grey through adding titanium white to chrome black. Then I divided it in three parts. One part was left as it was. The second part was mixed with a tiny drop of cobalt blue. The third part was mixed with a bit of raw umber. I diluted all three mixtures with some water to make it real fluid but not too watery.
With a brush I splattered paint onto the black base coat. First the blue mixture. I let that dry for about 10 miutes and then pressed a paper towel onto the surface to take away all that had not yet dried. Then I repeated that with the base grey, and lastly the brownish grey.
You can see in the larger patches of paint that the edges had dried while the inside was still wet. Taking up the poist paint with a paper towel creates subtle colourchanges within the same colour paint. So after not too many layers I ended with this result. I love it and will repeat it some more on other furniture. Because this table is going back to its owner. :-)
The gilding was done with leaf metal. I have shown you a few times before how that is done. So I will not repeat that here. The end result is a table that noone needs to be asgamed of to place in a dollshouse. And all it took was a couple of bucks worth of materials and a few hours of labour.
Well, that is it for now. I will be back soon, but first I have to catch up on all your blogs!
Hugs,
Huibrecht
