Pompeii No.43: The Right Pompeian Red

commons.wikimedia.org

You may remember that when I started painting the Pompeii Room, I chose an earthy red that Sherwin Williams calls Ablaze. The Ablaze paint chip looks like the square below.

Certain paint colors — like red and yellow — can be tricky. When I study paint chips, I look at them in different lights, including taking the chip outdoors to see it in natural light. Nonetheless, the translation from chip to wall can be surprising. In my case, the almost brick red of the chip turned into a bright red on the wall.

While Ablaze was a little too bright for my specific purpose, it probably would have been the hue that the Pompeians themselves preferred.

activeartist.net  |  www.mining.com  |  commons.wkimedia.org  |  www.wildcolours.co.uk

The Pompeians derived their reds from the earth, using — from left to right — red ochre, iron ore, hematite and madder root. The image on the far left (of red ochre) is from the Wilgie Mia Mine in Australia.

Of course, when working with stuff that was quite brown in its raw state, a brighter color would be the most preferred. The best red of Pompeii was a vermilion made from the cinnabar mineral. We've come to associate the word cinnabar with fine Asian objets d'art like the box below, in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

photo by R. Weller/Cochise College  |  collections.vam.ac.uk

The Pompeian paint made from cinnabar was 16 times more expensive than the paint made from red ochre, and the raw materials to make the paint would have been supplied by the wealthy client.

Despite the prestige of a bright red made from cinnabar, I opted to use a darker red, more like red ochre. My thought was that the darker red would better complement the auburn that is the base color for the upper panels. I went with a color Sherwin Williams calls Cochineal, and above you can see the difference between the before and after.

I bought two quarts of Cochineal and began painting over the original red. To my great dismay, the darker red would not cover the brighter red! I went to Sherwin Williams (I am not remunerated for mentioning the brand), and the employees there informed me that I would need to cover the original red with a gray primer, and then paint at least three coats of the Cochineal red.

gettyimages.com

 I have to admit that for a moment I reverted to an earlier mode of expression.

Here's the wainscoting brought back to a gray primer. The paint store said I would need a least three coats of the new red, but in fact I painted four coats of Cochineal.

Here you can see the progression from Ablaze to gray to Cochineal. The Cochineal is essentially the color of the window frame's original shadow.

And here's the revised, deeper red. I still have to paint the switch plate, but I'm leaving that for a little later. In my next posting, we'll do something fun with that bar of gray, so I hope you'll check back then!
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Pompeii No.7: Painting Hallway Masonry

Mark D. Ruffner

This week I'm concentrating on painting the masonry that will surround the doorway to my hall.

Originally, I had contemplated stonework that was aged and maybe even a little decayed, but in the end, I didn't want an element that would contrast with the freshness of the rest of the mural. Anyway, my Pompeii is not the one of ruins!

I realized, however, that the actual texture of the wall could be used to advantage, to create a rich, subtle underpainting of stone (limestone, perhaps). I started by putting light washes of earth tones on the wall. Then I rubbed away selected areas with a scouring pad.

Once that was done, I redrew the lines representing cracks, and repeated the process numerous times. While all this scrubbing created a pretty nifty stone texture, the look at this stage was not in keeping with the rest of the mural. Not to worry; I added several light washes to approximate limestone.

In making the stonework lighter, one of my goals was to make the stone and columns close in color value. Because the design is going to become increasingly more complex, it will be all the more important for each element to complement the next one.

The finished, more subtle result can be seen below.

Then it became a matter of adding the cracks, with their shadows and highlights. I did this several times. On my first try, I played around with chips and all sorts of unevenness in the lines (like the first photograph of this posting). I quickly discovered that the more regular I made my blocks, the more convincing they were. So most of my irregularities are small ones, at the corners of the blocks.

I'm not showing you the whole doorway surround for a good reason. Next week I'll be painting a panel on either side of the doorway, as though they're inset. They aren't Pompeian panels, but they'll complement the Pompeian design.

No, these are decorations that a man named Francesco della Rovere would have recognized.
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Pompeii No.4: Painting Around The Window

In my last posting, I shared the Pompeii Room's color scheme with you. If it were possible to remove the roof from the house and look down into the room, it would look like the image below.

"A" leads to a hallway and the griffin overdoor I posted about on February 24th, "B" leads to my kitchen, and "C" is a window that looks out into my back yard. I'll paint the areas that are colored tan to look like masonry, and that way I think the doorways will make more sense to the rest of the mural.

As I walk through my front door, I face the window, and so I thought it would be important to tackle that rear wall first. There's a 9½" space above the window, and that could make a window frame look a little top-heavy. But the space is also perfect for a torus.

A torus is simply a rounded moulding, but it is most often associated with this design, which is an oak torus.

I'm painting the torus in a rather loose way because I want to give a little momentum to the project. I'll come back later and define those leaves and acorns better, and darken the shadows. I'll also come back at the end of the project and put colorful marble in the plaque, and an inscription. For now, anyway, the window is presentable.

As this photograph was taken, I was repairing a little water damage to the ceiling, so it wasn't painted blue yet. The window also boasts venetian blinds that detract from the illusion of Pompeii, so until I come up with an appropriate window treatment, I'll PhotoShop-mask the window in gray.

Speaking of PhotoShop, the computer is an important tool in the whole process, and in ways that the casual observer would never guess. For example, the ceiling rises approximately ¼" on the right, meaning that my oak torus would have a disturbing gap above it on one side.

However, in PhotoShop I can skew the whole design just a tad so that the torus will  fill and correct the space in an imperceptible way (unlike the exaggerated example above) .

The window frame itself is looking three-dimensional, less for the rendering of stonework than for the shadowing, which gives the appearance of the shadow changing according to the different colors "underneath."

Since my last posting, I've also painted the baseboards a gray that complements both the carpeting and the Greek key. I talked about that Greek key in an early blog posting, here. The design comes from an Irish castle, and I hand-painted it throughout much of my house. That required many hours lying down on the job, with a curious pet rabbit nearby, wondering what I could possibly be doing!

Here's the Pompeii Room as it looks today. As you can see, the ceiling is now all blue, and I'm pleased with the progress of the window wall. Now I can concentrate on blocking in the rest of the base colors.

Next week I'll be painting the columns and the frieze that connects them. The columns, which are very particular to Pompeian design, might be unlike any you've seen before!
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Pompeii No.3: Starting To Paint

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus

As I looked at images of Pompeian-style rooms, I wanted to pick authentic colors that went beyond the typical Pompeian red and black. I also wanted a painted wainscoting, and I spent a lot of time studying the room pictured below.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel  |  Bergdoll  |  Rizzoli  |  photograph by Erich Lessing

I like that deep red color and how it's combined with green, and I like the illusion of panels on the wainscoting. You might be wondering which monarch occupied this room. It was designed between 1829 and 1833 by the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and it was actually part of the Court Gardener's House, in Prussia.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin   |   Spring 2010

The colors that I finally settled on are a nod to the Pompeian villa of P. Fannius Synistor. This particular panel can now be viewed in the Louvre. Part of my attraction to this image is the paneling delineated by fine lines of highlighting and shadow. a typical Pompeian style. I'll definitely incorporate that look.

My colors are Sherwin Williams Paints, and they break down as follows:

• Vast Sky (for the top of the mural and ceiling)
• Insightful Rose (for architectural elements)
• Arresting Auburn (for the top of panels)
• Alaea (for the bottom of panels)
• Butternut (as the base color for golden ornamentation)
• Lounge Green (for the top border of the wainscoting)
• Ablaze (for the wainscoting)

The colors will be combined to look like the simplified layout below. Of course there will be many layers of decoration overlaying this scheme!

I began by determining the top edge of the wainscoting, and I drew that line with a level. Experience has taught me the hard way not to measure up from the floor, or down from the ceiling. By establishing a level line and working from that, [almost] everything will be nicely squared.

My living room has two walls of bookcases with cabinets beneath, so it makes sense to have the top edge of the wainscoting be level with the top of the cabinets.

As you can see, there is some texture to the wall, but it is regular enough so that I didn't feel the need to resurface the wall. (The walls of Pompeian murals, however, were very smooth.)

I'll have you know I painted those lines by hand! For a long time I've had an aversion to taping because the paint always seemed to bleed, or I'd pull up the paint that was already down. But after painting that green line, I realized that not using tape was an exercise in madness.

It pays to ask experts for advice, and I was directed to this green Frog Tape, which is made especially for taping rougher surfaces like stucco, concrete and brick. The only thing I did that isn't covered in the instructions was to burnish about 1/8" along the very edge of the tape. It's been working like a charm.

Here's a slightly blurred photo of the room at the very beginning of the project. Not to worry, I'll be showing lots of clear details as we go along.

That white baseboard doesn't look good sandwiched between the red paint and the gray carpeting, does it? If I paint it a slightly darker gray, it should look nicely tailored.

In my next posting, I'll concentrate on painting around that window. I have an idea for it that's been tucked away in my memory banks for a long time.
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Above The Door To The Inner Sanctum

The hallway to my bedroom is a direct shot from the living room, so the bedroom door is actually very visible to my living room guests. When I was repainting the hallway, I decided to make the bedroom entrance a bigger statement.

click to enlarge

This griffin decoration is achieved with the same Sherwin Williams paints that I used in the hallway, with acrylic paints added for some of the shading.

www.ne.se

The original overdoor was carved in 1794 by Pehr Ljung for Regent Carl of Sweden. Carl acted as regent for his nephew from 1792-1796, and as Carl XIII of Sweden from 1809-1818. The griffin was Carl's heraldic device, and in this arrangement, griffins guard the tripod sacred to Apollo, symbolizing Carl as guardian of the arts.
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Trompe l'Oeil Corner

Above is a corner within my house where the dining room meets the living room. If you were to enter and walk through the house, you'd think nothing of that corner. But actually, you'd be looking at a painted shadow.

This is a schematic of the photo above. My living room flows into a small dining area that's practically a nook. Light comes in through two sources, French doors to the south and one window to the north. Because light is very diffused, I've mirrored one living room wall, floor to ceiling, then painted the other walls a light yellow (A). That does little, however, to lighten the back wall of the dining room (B), which is in shadow. Of course I could have painted that wall and wall C a yet lighter yellow, but those walls would then have become pretty anemic. Besides, I wanted wall C to be strong enough to complement the kitchen beyond, which is a yellow-orange.

And so I hit upon the idea of accentuating the shadows instead. These are the colors I used:

I know, you're looking at that Golden Pearl and thinking it looks pretty raw. But if you look at the top photo again, you might agree that it looks less like Golden Pearl and more like the dark shadow of Buttercup. In fact, when one looks into the dining area, it appears to all be one color. What makes that work is that wall B, which is Rattan, is a perfect bridge between the other two, and no one looking at the Rattan wall would ever know that it too is a painted shadow.

When we're painting walls, we're really playing with light. We can make walls appear larger or smaller, warmer or cooler, lower or higher. And, we can even make a shadow appear crisper!

P.S. Light yellow is a particularly changeable color, and I had to paint my living room walls four times to get the right look. Some yellows looked bad in my particular lighting and some yellows looked absolutely green in the mirror reflection!