Painting and Playing

12th April - 15th April 2021

Starting painting the exterior

So, getting back to my mini project, I started looking into methods of aging the bricks and got side tracked. I will need to paint both inside and out of each panel so I started to think about the interior decoration while doing that. I am planning to use the typical Tuscan and even Amalfi style of tiling on the inside. Yes, it’s true, most of these limonaia never really had tiling from top to bottom but I am going to put some mural tiles on the inside of each section under the windows.  Also here I will need to age these a bit but I needed at least to start off by finding some images to use.  So after digging around on the internet, I managed to find some and adjusted the dimensions somewhat to fit my needs. First was to print them out in black and white on the normal printer to check sizing etc. Then I print them out on my color printer, again on normal paper.  I like the colors very much! So bright!

Sizing and placement tests

Years ago I had bought some little ugly 2cm by 2cm glass mosaic tiles at a craft store. They were cheap and crappy quality but I plan on covering them with little citrus images and tile designs. I was going to use these in the spaces under the windows but the sizes do not match up and since they are glass and not acrylic, I needed to make some tests on cutting them to size.

 

First little tile done.

So, in the meantime, I screwed around with putting an image on one anyway, just to test it out.  I glued it on with watered down Vinavil glue (no such thing as Modge Podge here in Italy), then a little on the outside being careful not to apply too much to avoid smudging the inkjet image. Once it was dry, I varnished up the outside. I made it pretty thick so that the tile didn’t have a super even surface or streaks.  I think it came out great! Now just have to fool around with trying to cut them just to see if I can and be able to use them elsewhere in the tea room. (I found this image off a vendor on Amazon)

 

In my searches on the net I came across another person writing about lemons and Florentine lemons, just a small excerpt but nice none the less.  The blog has lots of info! Check it out!