The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

The Portrait

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

"How hard can it be to paint marble? A lot harder than I thought and it took longer, too. I had a color picture of a sample of Crema Valencia marble and it was easy enough to match the background color. Attempts to add the "marbling" were highly unsatisfactory, as I didn't really know what I was doing (rendering that really great leather shoe probably made me think I could do anything). After trying to paint the floor three times and getting a bigger mess each time, I looked at a lot more marble samples online, borrowed a book from Aldith on painting faux finishes, and finally gave in and ordered a book on the subject -- "The Art of Faux The Complete Sourcebook of Decorative Painted Finishes" by Pierre Finkelstein. This book is really for doing fake finishes on wall for trompe l'oeil, but I purchased it because it got down to the nitty-gritty of painting. The prize was an analysis by the author of different types of marble and how to represent their distinctive veining patterns.

"The background color was painted first and I tried to leave slivers of vellum showing the edges of the tiles, which mostly got obscured later on. The base color was yellow ochre with the addition of Spectrum Yellow, then tinted with Permanent White. Once the base color was down, the color was lightened with more white and splotches of this were put down. The veining was painted in with Raw Sienna. Marble veining is done by working from the top to the bottom of the piece in a step-like way, trembling the bush slightly, with lines that should look like lightning bolts. First some heavy veins are laid down, then connecting veins are added, like wavery lozenges with the brush almost dry. Finally, a few more fissures are added which sort of run across the general lay of the veining. Lastly, everything is feathered over delicately with a slightly damp brush, to soften the harsh edges.

"I practiced this by doing some on a scratch piece of paper just to get the feel for it, then I drew a rough outline of the area of the floor and repeated the exercise, this time angling the lines the way they need to be for perspective. The faux finish books generally show you how to imitate something when it's seen straight on -- this floor had to be treated like any other part of a perspective drawing, when meant the overall trend of the lines in the marble veining had to obey the rules of perspective. One can do this by either applying angles as used in one-point perspective, doing it solely by eye, or doing a trial piece as seen straight on, then tilting the trial piece until it matches the angle you want and using that as your guide. I did it by eye and painted the floor two more times before it got anywhere close to what I wanted. Along the way I also took belated notice of the fact that I had the perspective wrong on the column bases, and redrew those. I still wasn't happy about the appearance of the marble but that was only the start of more headaches.

"I hate a challenge while it's happening -- it's a lot more fun afterwards." -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

The West Kingdom History Website was created by and is maintained by Hirsch von Henford (mka Ken Mayer).