cornice!

So here it is it has been a long time coming

 

And I know you have all been losing sleep with the question 'when will I get to read about Janine’s cornice' you wait is over!!!!

TA DA!!!!!

TA DA!!!!!

To tell you the truth I had forgotten about it myself after wrapping it up and putting it to bed in the plant room all those months ago but today I had to move it ( we had a massive tidy in the workshop)

And remember that my audience were waiting!!!

This cornice is in a Persian style made of timbre, ply and resin castings.

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photo of castings taken from Persepolis 

photo of castings taken from Persepolis 

The date stamps in my photos are shopping me out on how bad I am at posing regularly too!

After a lot of research into which style I wanted my cornice in (and lots of trips to museums) o designed the shape and details I wanted. The next step was to draw a side view of what the cornice would look like and break it into section of materials. This would also aid me in making the cornice as light as possible.

As you can see from the photo I labelled my pieces and dimensioned them.

the 'h' section of the diagram

I started with building the base (section H) which was a simple 'on end' timber frame made of 2x1 and clad in 4mm thick ply. The base was 2 metres long

I then marked out where the protruding pieces would fit. this was a good starting point for visualising my mouldings that I would go onto make they needed to be adjusted a little from the drawings to get the proportions right

Starting to build the cornice up

I may have talked about this before but something that occurs a bit in scenery building is 'cutting the cuts out'. This is when you have a large piece of (normally) sheet material and you cut away the middle to lose weight, cutting away in sections means that the material still keeps it structural properties but is just a lot lighter.

This is a picture of the cornice frame all built up and I have started to attached the resin pieces to the dentals (the blocks of ply)

Unfortunately I cannot find the other pictures I have of the timbre frame being built.

resin casts

These resin cast pieces are bases on ancient wall carvings.

The resin pieces were created by moulding the shapes from Clay and then making a silicon mould. Once the mould had set I poured in fibreglass resin (like when I made my face mask) but this time I did not add any fibreglass matting.

I repeated the same process for both my styles of casting.

I built my cornice as one long piece I then had to add a mitre into it. I decided to do it down the middle. When I mitred it I did loose quite a bit of material so the sides are more like 90cm instead of a metre.

mitred and castings added

I also added supports around the back to help it keep its shape

upsited down ready for spraying

You can see the different sections and thicknesses of timbre used to make up the cornice from this side view. To attach it to the base board I used a combination of staples, screws and of course glue!

The Resin pieces were attached using hot melt and a glue gun

all sprayed up

close up

I decided that I would go for just a simple light grey paint finish. This has picked up the detail nicely. I may add a bit of texture to it before my exhibition but I quite like that it keeps the lines very crisp.

So there you go my cornice looking back on the photos and no doubt when I get it back out again before the exhibition I will cringe a little, but in a way that is a good thing it will show that I have improved at least!

The current personal project that I have been working on is an art nouveau door which I am starting to think may be my favourite project so far!!

I will keep you all posted!