Painting Your Ceiling to Look Like a Sky #PublishingArticles

Painting Your Ceiling to Look Like a Sky #PublishingArticles

The notion of painting a ceiling to look like a sky goes back many centuries and has never really been out of fashion. Painted skies are particularly suited to sloping attic rooms, wrapping up the space in a romantic, airy canopy and providing an extra dimension of light and space. In standard box rooms, it can be a good idea to install a picture rail and treat the area above it to match the sky ceiling.

Of all the many different sky paint effect recipes, this must be one of the simplest and easiest to live with. Just two glaze colors, applied over a white base, are mutton clothed into soft, billowy cloud shapes with a hint of sunshine peeping through. For greater theatrical impact the effect can be beefed up by adding white, to shape more definite clouds, and darker blue for contrast. By adding touches of grey, mauve and orange it can be evolved into a more dramatic sunset sky. Or, with a darker spectrum of blues and tiny star stencils, you can use exactly the same technique to make a dark night sky. Stars can also be faked with fiber-optic lights embedded in the ceiling.

Materials and Equipment:

White vinyl silk emulsion paint
Large paintbrush
Pale blue pre-tinted glaze, or acrylic scumble glaze mixed with artist’s acrylic colors in ultramarine, titanian white and Paynes grey.
Long-handled roller (for high ceilings) or ladder
Block brush
Mutton cloth
Cloths

Pale yellow pre-tinted glaze or acrylic scumble glaze mixed with yellow ocher and white Softening brush

1) Paint the ceiling and sloping walls with two coats of white vinyl silk emulsion paint. Apply blue glaze in random strokes, leaving white patches in between. Use a roller on a long handle if the ceiling is very high, or a brush if you can reach. Work in one meter square sections as most acrylic glazes begin to set in about 3 – 10 minutes, depending on the temperature of the room. The cooler the glaze, the longer it will remain malleable.

2) While the glaze is still wet, break up and obliterate the brush strokes with the block brush, softening the break between blue and white patches. Rub the mutton cloth into the glaze in a circular motion to make fairly definite cloudy shapes, revealing the white paint below. Go over the whole area again with mutton cloth to give a soft, airy effect.

3) Even after the glaze has dried, you can rub it away with a damp cloth to make more cloud shapes. Alternatively, if you want to beef up the color, you can add more of the blue glaze, or even a darker shade of blue if you wish.

4) Using an ordinary brush loaded with creamy yellow glaze, fill in around the edges of some of the clouds. Use mutton cloth to fudge the edges and blend the clouds into the sky. This step will create the effect of sun shining through the clouds.

5) To soften the effect further, you can go over the yellow glaze with a softening brush if you wish. Another way is to draw a globe or other drawings of your choice to augment with the sky.