There are some DIY tasks I would never think of doing, and would not be capable of even if I had the inspiration. One such task is stencilling a ceiling.
My friends Jo and Mark were showing me around their house when we came to a small, square spare bedroom.
“Look up,” they said, and my simultaneous thoughts were: “Why would that ever occur to you?” And: “how did you do it?”
The reproduction antique bedNick Inman
They had acquired a second-hand reproduction of an antique French bed in Lincolnshire, of all places, which they had restored in an elegant combination of black and gold.
Don’t ask me whether the style is Louis XVI or Second Empire; all I know is that it is certainly more classy than anything in my house.
This bed was to go into a room with two doors that was almost a glorified passageway. The question was: how would they make this bedroom into somewhere in which such a piece of furniture would look at home?
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Paint and wallpaper can only do so much. A striking feature was needed.
The answer they came up with was to give the ceiling a palatial feel by applying some elegant stencilling.
It would have been hard enough to do this in a simple pattern and by employing a single colour, but that wasn’t enough of a challenge for Mark.
This was his Sistine Chapel and he was going to do it exactly how he wanted: working standing up on top of low scaffolding and wearing a neck pillow.
He needed a set of three plastic stencils of a floral design for the composition. One for the corners, one for the middles of the sides and a semi-circular one, which he flipped to go around the central ceiling rose.
“I wanted to use high-quality stencils and paints,” says Mark, “to be sure of a good finish.”
If you are new to stencils, it is strongly advisable to watch videos of the technique online. One good site for this is royaldesignstudio.com.
The stencils need to be placed carefully in position and not moved.
For this, Mark used spray mount glue (colle repositionnable), which keeps the stencil in place but does not leave a mark on the ceiling.
He chose five complementary colours in good quality acrylics and decided where each would fit in the design.
It is delicate work that requires the right calibre of brush, loaded with just the right amount of paint (the excess removed with a cloth), and applied with a dabbing motion.
It also needs immense patience to let one colour dry before filling in the adjacent part of the stencil.
Overview of stencillingNick Inman
Removing the stencil after painting is nerve-wracking – it must be done slowly and with the utmost care.
With the corners and the middle of the sides done, Mark decided something was missing.
He added green ‘dashes’ to connect them and make the composition continuous.
He had to improvise the method for this using part of one of the other stencils.
The room is more than its stencilled ceiling. It has a colour scheme which shows off the bed without smothering it. The cornice is black, to make the colours of the stencilling stand out, and the wallpaper green, echoing one of the colours above.
Jo and Mark are the first to admit that it is not going to be everyone’s solution for a spare room, but it is certainly something to admire.
There is an age-old debate about the difference between craftwork (or DIY) and art. Here, I would definitely argue that the distinction is blurred to glorious effect.
