Ceiling is done

The work pace at the miniature construction site has slowed down a bit. Firstly because I did not have material to work with and I did have to visit the craft shop. Secondly because I'm not too sure how I'm going to proceed from here. I have desided what I'm going to do, but I haven't desided on how. I'm faced with a few structural difficulties, but more about that later.

After I did visit the crafts shop and got all I needed, I started to work on the ceiling. First I made a frame for the ceiling and attached the ceiling boards (fire starter sticks again). I prepainted the boards before the attachment.

When we were in Japan we saw a lot of painted ceilings on shrines and tearooms. Most ceilings had a dragon painted on them. Later I read from the web that the dragon and the tiger, which was also present in many paintings, represents the ying and yang. These symbols originate from China, but are adabted to the Japan by Buddhism. The paintings were usually done by using only black colour and the background was golden. I wanted these two symbols to be presented in my tearoom too. I made two areas with molding or strips of wood where I painted the symbols.

I have never been really good to draw freehand, but I'm really good at copying pictures of others. I searched from the web two images, one of the tiger and one of the dragon (I think the dragon might be someone's tattoo, I'm sorry to steal your tattoo). I resized the images and printed them out. Then I used a piece of baking paper to transfer the image to the ceiling. This method might be obvious to you, but I'm still going to write it through here. I use a softish pencil, a softness of HB is fine. I draw the lines of the image to the baking paper, you could simplify the image at this point by ignoring some details.

Then I flip the paper around on the place where I want the image to be. I press the lines I've drawn to the surface using the same pen. I just colour the area that I want to press. You could also press with something that does not leave a mark, but I've found that it's difficult to remember what parts I have pressed and what not. Then I just lift the baking paper and I have the lines transferred to the surface. The same image can be transferred even three times, although the lines get lighter and lighter every time. You should notice that the image on the final surface is a mirrored one, so if you need the image on a certain way, mirror the image on the computer before printing.

Eventhough the paintings in Japan mostly had golden backround I desided to take liberties on that one. I painted the dragon and tiger golden and left the backround white.

Now I had my ceiling ready. I glued the ceiling to it's place. And here it is, my nice ceiling that no one will probably never notice, unless they deside to get real close and turn their head upside down.

Next I'm going to make the roof, I think, and that's were the problems start. I'm so glad I've studied structural desing, that's going to help me a lot... yeah right.

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This post belongs to the series of posts for the I'm a Giant challenge by Emily Henderson. All my posts about the challenge can be found behing this link.