Fauxology: Studying the Visual Magic of Faux Finishing and Interior Design (brought to you by Garay Artisans)

I hope everyone’s weekend was great!  I wish mine had been a bit more productive but that may be almost everyone’s gripe, right?  I keep writing to the government about a 3-day weekend but I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with them.  C’est la vie.

Well, I wanted to show you a bit of what we call Smoky Ceilings.  It’s when we apply glaze and make it darker around the perimeter (”smoking” the edges) and then lighten it up when coming towards the middle.  We’ve done quite a few of them and my brother and I finally have a system down but the first one we ever did was a doozy.  Lots of tweaking and fixing to make it a seamless flow.

This is the before pic of a groin ceiling.  At least it had been painted and not left white but it did need a bit of oomph.  I think when the ceiling saw us it said “Yes!  I get to be special now!”  (…I know, I have an overactive imagination.)  The client did not really want this area to go over-the-top, which you can easily do with a ceiling shaped like this one.  She just wanted us to put ”a nice glaze on it and that’s it”.

Well, nothing said we couldn’t start with a different base coat.  I loved the metallic color on the light fixture (a sorta champagne-silver color) and I tried out a few metallic colors from a few manufacturers but nothing seemed just right.  I spent about half an hour playing mad scientist, mixing a bit of this and a bit of that and finally had the color down perfectly.  It took three coats for opaque coverage.

Using the light fixture colorations, we mixed a reddish-brown glaze and started glazing the ceiling.  As you can see, we kept the edges darker and swooped it into the four groin edges.  The client loooooooooooooooooooooved it.

Here’s a shot from underneath where you can see the dark edges better.  Pardon the view askew and my thumb on the upper right…   

There’s more you can do with groin ceilings…i.e., add a design along the edges, add a design on each of the four quadrants, do a multi-color glaze or plaster finish…but in the end, it comes down to what is right for the space and what is right for the client.  We have some more cool ceilings and rooms coming up this week so stay tuned…