I want to turn this old frame with a piece of board stapled to it (given to me by my friend Miriam) into what will look like a piece of a tiled bathroom floor for a project I am working on. I have an idea for an upcoming juried show.
I went to home depot to gather ideas and I picked up a bunch of paint chip cards, I cut them all into 1" squares and was going to glue them down to create the tile floor and look- not nearly enough! I did not feel like driving back to the store and I wasn't sure about these anyway cause I am going to be pouring resin over the whole thing and didn't want them coming up.
Plan B is to paint tile squares....
First I covered the whole board with Gesso and let it dry.
Then I used painters tape and made horizontal stripes leaving a small gap between tape strips to fill in with brown paint.
I let the paint dry and then peeled off the tape to reveal horizontal stripes.
Next I used the same pieces of tape and put them across horizontally.
I then painted those spaces, let dry and peeled off the tape again. I now have a checker board pattern. Where the paint leaked under the tape, didn't matter...
as I then painted each square individually with 4 different colors. First I used an off white mixed with burnt umber and yellow ochre. It looked kind of dirty when it dried...so I then did a layer of white and light blue which gave it a cleaner look but also more three dimensional quality with all the layers of different whites in each square.
I then glued a "Health Check" card and painted a shadow around it. When it was dry I poured Enviro Tex lite, pour on high gloss finish...one coat is equal to 50 coats of varnish. I moved it to a warmer part of the house and let it dry 48 hours before...
I started laying things on it. Now to back track a minute, the only items I purchased exclusively for this project were the scale and fork which I bought at a thrift store for a total of $5. My original plan was to have just the scale, dumbell and wieghts all attached to each other and it would be a hanging piece. I had them set out at the BOSCO art studio tour and one coment was I should get a piece of tile floor to hang it on. So that was how the tile floor came about. Then I wanted to hang this whole thing on the wall but the dumbells and scale weigh quite a bit and I think might just pull off the wall or frame.
Plan B on the display: now it could either be displayed as shown above by sitting on a pedestal or...
Plan C: attach the frame to this table and make it a functional piece as well as a statement.
The scale, dumbbell and fork and vegetables become part of the base. The drawer would be used to hold women's stories. Read below to see what I have in mind and then please leave me a comment.
The comment can either be something to go in the drawer or your thoughts on how you think this piece should be shown or both. If the base with drawer is not used then the notes of paper will be slipped around the sides of the scale on top.
