The travels that inspire.

After last weeks posting my Dining room Mural, I took some time looking back at pictures from Tuscany that I took. There is some thing that draws visitors to just looking and taking pictures of Doors. These are just a very small collection of some of the doors from Volterra, the place depicted in the mural.

  Love the carving of these doors, I had to have a close look and a touch.

This one has new plantings.

This one has this wonderful color.

This is a back door, seeing only the shutter doors.

Store fronts intermingle with residents, wouldn’t you love having fresh flowers next door to your home?

Or, a restaurant with this quaint out door dining?

Or, fresh Produce displayed every morning, right down the stone paved street?

Is this their version of Boar’s head meats?

Of course there is always laundry day, it is part of living there.

What a happy site to see the Stars and Stripes at this store front.

Back home to the Villa, it has a more modern Iron and glass door with a center lever with lock. I do prefer the older wood doors but this door will get you to look at how it works and locks.

Hope you enjoyed the tour and the small part of their every day life.

Mural for the Dining Room

After moving into my new home and taking a trip back to Italy, I knew that I would be painting a mural some where in my house. The dining room was perfect not only in wall space but there were two columns and an arch to the entry into the dining room that I could tie into the mural.  Wanting to remember what I saw everyday while in Tuscany, the mural would be that of the walled city of Volterra and the Villa I stayed in while there.

My Dining Room is a nice size and has room for the 102” long table that I love for entertaining. The ceiling height is 11’ and has nice crown molding, but other then that, the room was really  boring. Paint would have helped, but a mural, faux treatment to the other walls and a marbleizing treatment to the columns would make it a little more interesting.

This is how it Progressed from what it was to what it is now.

     

Plain Walls, out dated swags and side panels, old brass lighting fixture. (and my Boxer, Topper trying to get out of the picture)

Sorry about this scanned picture, but it does show the work in progress. I had drawn a repeat of the real arch when you enter the dining room and columns to match the real ones.

 After completing the mural, I moved on to the rest of the walls with a two color wash. 

 

After the walls were done the real columns had to be painted, but I couldn’t use the same paint as I did on the walls. I would have to match the colors used for the faux Columns,  with Oils.

This was the start of the marbleizing with the oils which took longer then the rest of the room and while waiting for paint to dry, it was very nice to sit back and have a glass of Santa Margherita. I guess one night I had a few too many glasses of that product from Italy and painted in a wine glass to sit on the faux ledge.

Some Wine, anyone??

After a month of living in my paint clothes and in the dining room I was done, well with the painting.

I made a more playful valance to replace the old stuffy stuff and started looking for a new chandelier.

 

I did find a fixture that I like, so it was out with the old.

Now I think I will gold leaf the ceiling and change the flooring.

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