Big Job

I have been working a very large job this past week. I have been creating a tuscany type of wall finish using a colored glaze technique over the existing textured wall. As you can see from the first picture this is a large space. The foyer I am working is app. 12 feet wide and 45 feet long with 25 foot ceilings. I have 3 levels of scaffoldling set up to do this job.

This next picture is a good one to let you see just how the finish is looking. The wall to the left is what I started with. Quite a dramatic difference after the glazing goes on. I use a two pass technique which I developed. This technique allows me to work on large areas without worrying about the dreaded "overlap" lines.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in creating a look like this is making sure you get that "consistently inconsistent look" over the entire wall. You want those darker areas and lighter areas but you want them to be fairly uniform without being a repeating pattern. Now, a large part of that challenge is to not get any of the "overlapping lines" on your wall.

An over lapping line occurs when the glaze has dried on the edge of the application area and then when you go back to that area again and overlap onto it. Look at the next picture. This is where I finished at the end of one days work. When I come back the next day and pick it up again I don't want to see a line down the wall where I had stopped and started. So what I do is create a stopping point like you see. On the leading edge of the glaze, after I apply it, I take a cotton rag and wipe it back taking off most (if not all at the start) of the glaze with it. I probably wipe off about 5-6 inches of glaze, feathering it back from the edge.

Then the next day I start by applying the glaze in the area which has no glaze and working back into the previous days work. I feather the glaze back into the previous days work so that when it does overlap only a very little amount of glaze is actually overlapping the previous day's work. But I overlap it by the 5-6 inches I had wiped off the previous day. Then I intergrate the pattern flow into the new application areas again using the two pass technique. In the picture below you can see where the wall is now done and there are no overlapping lines. There is a smooth flow across the entire surface of the wall.