By Paula Briggs & Rowan Briggs Smith

This post shares the progress of a family project undertaken during Lockdown 2020. 

If you are one of the lucky ones, (and we know we are very lucky), then lockdown provides the opportunity to shrink down the world a little bit into something more manageable and controllable. It also provides the opportunity, again if you are lucky, to enjoy being home. 

Making things has for us as a family always been a way to calm the body and occupy the mind. There is something so elemental about taking a material, shaping it with your hands, and making something new. And while the hands are busy, and the mind is challenged with problem solving, the body can relax. 

Given that we were to spend the vast majority of our time in our home, for who knows how long, we decided we needed a making project to bring us together for a part of each day, and to occupy our head and hands. Given also that we were to spend most of our time within the walls of our house, we decided to really study those walls; to measure, to plot, to understand and appreciate those walls. How did they fit together? What was the relationship of parts? What are the “essential” items of our home? What do we love? Which spaces do we most enjoy? What makes this our home?

And so the idea for our scale model of home and garden came about on Day 5 of lockdown. We hope you enjoy watching its progress on Instagram at LittleHouseOnWestStreet.

And a big thank you to all those delivery drivers who have fed us with plywood and balsa wood and sandpaper and wood filler, whilst we squirrel ourselves away making our version of our home. And to all those people who are working so hard during lockdown to help make things right, and who cannot stay home surrounded by the people and things they love, thank you. 

To Be Continued!

Please share your #lockdown projects with us

This is a sample of a resource created by UK Charity AccessArt. We have over 1500 resources to help develop and inspire your creative thinking, practice and teaching.

AccessArt welcomes artists, educators, teachers and parents both in the UK and overseas.

We believe everyone has the right to be creative and by working together and sharing ideas we can enable everyone to reach their creative potential.

See how primary school pupils responded to the AccessArt Village in Mansfield Central Library

Making an Ink and Wax Village with Pupils in Mansfield

This was a very special day for Sheila Ceccarelli from AccessArt, as she got to meet and work with sixty, year five pupils from Berry Hill Primary School in Mansfield Central Library, with colleagues from Inspire Arts Service, who had previously facilitated the development of the AccessArt Village across Nottinghamshire.

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The Firm

In 1862 Frederick Leach started F. R. Leach & Sons, artist-decorators who worked with the best-known Victorian architects/designers including William Morris, Charles Kempe and George Bodley.

Their expertise led the firm to work on ecclesiastical and civic arts, crafts and decoration as well as domestic architecture and interiors.

If their workshops could talk they would have told of stained glass being designed, painted and fired; stone statues carved; wooden decorations turned; panels chiselled, decorated and gilded; furniture crafted; metal forged; and tiles painted. In fact they could create anything that a well-decorated house, church or college would need.

Pouncing

Wall painting was a popular decoration for churches during the neo-gothic revival in the mid to late Victorian era.

The paint colour was mixed by hand and then often applied straight to the wall or ceiling. The design was often painted freehand or using stencils which included a technique called ‘Pouncing’.

This technique is where the design is drawn out on paper and the outline is pricked all around to produce small holes.

Click on the image above to see How to Make a Tessellated Design.

This is then placed on the wall and dabbed all over with a small bag of fabric filled with powdered graphite or chalk. The powder is forced through the holes so that when the paper is removed it leaves an outline of the pattern on the walls.

Click on the image above to see how teenagers used ‘Pouncing’ to Transfer Designs onto Plaster Tablets

Gilding

Gilding was a popular finish for the ornaments that decorated the ceilings of neo-gothic churches.

These ornaments were made of lead or plaster and were often start that shone down from their great height once gilded in gold.

The first stage to gilding is when gold is pounded until it becomes as thin as tissue paper (25g can be beaten out to cover an area of 3m square).

The surface of the ornament to be gilded is prepared by brushing it all over with a glue called size.

This is left to dry until it reaches a ‘tacky’ state.

The gold sheets are then carefully laid onto the surface of the ornament and the size sticks it to the surface.

The gold is then worked into all the areas of the ornaments using a brush to push it down. There were special brushes made for doing this including one made from squirrel’s fur.

Click on the image below to see how to apply gold leaf to a plaster relief sculpture Gilding and a Touch of Gold

Stained Glass

The neo-gothic revival saw a resurgence in stained glass design for churches and domestic architecture of the day.

One technique used was that of Silver Staining Glass. This is where silver nitrate is painted onto clear glass and fired until the silver paint becomes part of the molecular structure of the glass and produces colours from a pale yellow to a rich orangey-amber.

Follow the link above to see How to Print on Glass.

Motifs or designs were painted onto glass ‘quarries’ or shapes of glass that would be could together to form a leaded window.

For this reason diamonds, squares or other shapes that would tessellate were popular. This type of stained glass window also allowed a lot of light into the building which went well with the decoration of a neo-gothic church where the walls were decorated and deserved to be seen.

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