“The Furniture of Necessity” book will be written, illustrated and printed in the same spirit as the pieces of furniture between its covers. Instead of relying on SketchUp and digital photographs, the engraver will be making the plates for this book using the actual pieces as her guide.
While this will turn me into a furniture mover for the next 12 months, it also will result in illustrations that are rich in detail and unsanitized, unpasturized and un-homogenized. It will be like drinking the design warm from the the teat of (oh stop this line of thought now).
Today I finished up the six-board chest for the book by nailing on the escutcheon plate to the front. There will be no fake keyholes or keys or hat-tips to modern living. These pieces will work in the same way they worked 300 years ago.
I now have two of the pieces complete for the book. Twelve more to go.
There are lots of ways to achieve a cracked paint finish, and I don’t pretend to be an expert on all the different products and methods out there. But I do know what works for me every time, is completely controllable and is done with stuff I always have on hand.
I use a coat of slightly thinned liquid hide glue that I brush on between the base coat and the top coat of paint. As the top coat of paint dries, it cracks to reveal the color of the base coat.
I decided to use this finish on one of the many six-board chests I’m building for “The Furniture of Necessity” book. This chest features an enclosed base and a suite of iron hardware. The finish on this piece is a base coat of flat black latex paint with a topcoat of a flat acrylic blue paint.
Between these two coats is the hide glue, which is the big question in the minds of newcomers to this technique. Here’s how I do it and how I control the crazing effect.
1. Paint the case with your base coat of color. Flat sheens work better than gloss sheens. After the paint is dry, level it with a fine sanding sponge.
2. Get some liquid hide glue. Make sure it hasn’t expired, or the glue will dry slowly or not at all. Pour some glue into a bowl or cup and thin it with a little warm water. You want to get it the viscosity of latex paint – thin enough to brush on but thick enough to cover the base coat of paint.
The thickness of the glue/water mixture controls how much cracking you will get in your top coat of paint. A thick mixture will promote lots of cracks. A thin coat will produce fewer and smaller cracks. If your glue/water mixture is as thin as water, it is too thin. It won’t do much cracking to the top coat. So add more glue to your mixture. Or add a second coat of glue to your project.
I apply the glue with a chip brush and let it dry until I can touch it without removing glue from the surface.
3. Apply your topcoat of water-base paint and use all the same care you would use when applying any finish. Don’t get sloppy. Let the glue do that work for you.
The cracks should start to appear as the paint starts to “flash,” which is the point where it goes from wet to dry. Don’t muck with the finish as it dries. That’s a bad idea, like picking at a scab.
4. If you want to go a step further in adding age to your piece, apply a coat of black wax over the crazed finish after all the paint has dried. The color in the wax will lodge in the cracks and make the piece look both dirty and old.
For the piece shown in this article, I applied a heavy coat of glue to the top to create big cracks. I wanted the base to have more subtle cracks, so I added some warm water to my glue/water mixture before brushing the base.
This chest is complete except for the escutcheon plate. I’ve ordered a few iron German and French ones from Whitechapel Ltd.
If you want to dive deeper into this technique, here are resources I trust (there are some dumb, dumber and stupider methods on the Internet.)
• Glen Huey wrote an excellent article on this technique for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine. He compares hide glue to commercial crackling glazes and barriers formed by white and yellow glues. For a few dollars more, you can order the entire 2008 annual – a very good year.
While the six-board chest is a simple form, there are some variants that make the chest look more high-style, like it might have a fancy bracket-foot base.
Today I decided to convert the chest I built for the Alabama Woodworkers Guild into one of these fancier chests. I removed the moulding that returned down the sides of the chest (see the video here), and made some base pieces to fit under the moulding.
I also removed the crappy hinges I installed in Alabama. One leaf of each hinge was entirely too long. Today I installed iron Lee Valley unequal strap hinges, which look better. Unfortunately, I have some work ahead of me to hide the screw holes from the earlier hinge set.
I also installed a vintage crab/grab lock, which I picked up on eBay for $30 (gloat).
So far, I like the enclosed base, but I don’t want to pass judgment until I get the piece painted. The base coat will be flat black, followed by a coat of thinned hide glue. Then a top coat of dark blue, which will crackle thanks to the hide glue layer between.
“You can have art in your daily life if you want it, but you don’t. You prefer fountain-pens and motor cars.”
— Eric Gill, the creator of the Gill Sans typeface, as quoted in “Country Craftsmen” by Freda Derrick (1945)
Since the day my wife and I started work as newspaper reporters, we have collected what is called “outsider art.” The broad definition of the term is that it’s art made by people who lack formal artistic training. Usually, these people also have some sort of quirk or disability that shapes the way they see the world.
We first learned about this style of art from Mary Praytor, who runs a gallery on Main Street in Greenville, S.C. My wife and I would walk up there from the office of The Greenville News and Mary would tell us about all of the artists from her rotating stock. We were captivated. And, just as important, we could afford a few pieces. And so Lucy and I ate hot dogs plus mac and cheese in box so we could purchase our first pieces – two magic marker drawings on Formica by R.A. Miller.
Twenty-four years later, our house is filled with the stuff. I know a lot of visitors think our taste is odd (“It’s so cool that you have your childrens’ drawings on every wall,” is a common comment.) But I find this work important to me as both a writer and a woodworker.
Here’s why.
Whether you know it or not, newspaper journalism is one of the most formal and highly structured types of communication. I find it suffocating, and yet I cannot for the life of me shake loose from my four-year brainwashing. Even as I write this condemnation, I am paring back the words as I type, selecting simpler sentence structures and arranging things in series of threes to regulate the cadence.
So the outsider art is a visit to a place I cannot go. What does it look like to be a painter who doesn’t follow rules of composition, color and perspective? What if you didn’t start out by painting a bowl of fruit? And – most importantly – what does it look like if you do all these things without trying to do all these things?
With my woodworking, I had a glimpse of this non-formal approach. When I made my first pieces, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and I didn’t know that it mattered. I designed my pieces around my materials, my needs and what “looked kind of good.” I didn’t know there were rules for joints, unsupported spans or proportions.
Of the pieces I built, only about one in four was a success. The other three were recycled into something else or went to the fireplace. It wasn’t until I started work at Popular Woodworking in 1996 that I realized that .250 was a lousy batting average.
And so began my indoctrination into the rules of the craft. Like my journalism training, I am grateful for the knowledge. It puts food on the table, speeds my time in the shop and ensures my batting average is near 1.00. But the knowledge is also stifling to the design process.
The art around our house keeps me off-balance. I love it.
I don’t suspect these images will have the same effect on you, but I put them up here in the hope that you might think about the non-formal approach to the craft and how that relates to the “furniture of necessity.”
R.A. Miller
We own four R.A. Miller pieces (actually three; my daughter won one from me in a card game). Miller lived a half-day’s drive from us in Greenville, and we tried to go visit him once. This was in 1990 (pre-GPS), and we got turned around and lost.
The two Formica pieces we purchased are my favorites. One is a self-portrait of Miller yelling “Blow Oskar” to his uncle – asking his uncle to sound his horn as he drove by. The second piece is of Satan.
Though we were never able to visit Miller, two of our friends managed to find his place and bought some pieces from him where the paint was still wet.
Miller is also known for his animal, snake and dinosaur cutouts in metal.
Howard Finster
Howard Finster is probably one of the best-known artists of this genre and his “Paradise Garden” is an amazing place to visit. Lucy and I went there one weekend in 1991 and spent the day wandering around. We hoped to meet Miller, but he wasn’t around that day. So we got to spend the afternoon chatting with his family.
We purchased these two pieces for $35 each (and I think they knocked $5 off the total).
“Paradise Garden” is being restored and is open to the public. If you are ever in the Summerville, Ga., area you should go. It was built entirely by his hands and is jaw-dropping in its beauty and complexity.
Barbara Moran
I first encountered Barbara Moran’s work during a street festival in Cincinnati. The festival was put on by the Visionaries + Voices foundation, which seeks to cultivate artists with disabilities. In my view, the program is a stunning success, and it has made the city a hotbed of outsider artists.
Moran’s drawings were all in a pile – there must have been 50 or more. Many of them were of people who had their heads shaped as buildings. Or there were stoplights that walked. And a train with a person’s face, if I remember right.
I should have bought the whole pile. I was totally mesmerized.
But I just bought this piece, which hangs over me whenever I write.
Raymond Thunder-Sky
Raymond Thunder-Sky was one of Cincinnati’s best known outside artists. He was known as the “construction clown” because he would dress up in a clown outfit, don a hard hat and walk onto construction sites in Cincinnati. There he would record the events on the site.
I met Raymond once on the streets downtown. At the time I had no idea he was an artist.
I love his pieces, and I wish I could afford an original – they are hard to come by. My family bought me two prints from the gallery that now bears his name.
T7D
This guy is a volunteer at Visionaries + Voices and outsider artist himself. I’ve met him a few times, but I cannot recall his name. This chalk image, called “fuel,” is in my office.
The artist is well-known for his paintings of elephants and superheroes. I hope to run into him again.
We’ve just received our stock of the “Six Board Chest” DVD I shot with Lie-Nielsen in 2012. It’s my second “long-form” DVD at 120 minutes long and is focused as much on the techniques as the chest itself. And there are mistakes and fixes galore.
This style of chest is one of the pieces in my next book, “Furniture of Necessity.”
The official DVD description:
Six-board chests have been a part of human culture for centuries. And while building them is no mystery, building them quickly and entirely by hand is a window into the pre-industrial woodworker’s mindset.
Constructing a six-board chest is a good introduction to working efficiently with hand tools and quickly understanding that hand woodworking is very dissimilar to machine woodworking. Different things are important. And the order of operations is critical.
In July 2012, I spent a week at the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks shops filming this DVD on building a six-board chest using sugar pine. Like the “Build a Shaker Side Table” DVD, this was shot in real time with me narrating every operation. And narrating every mistake and every fix.
As a result, this DVD isn’t merely about the steps to build the chest. During the 120 minutes I cover stock dimensioning, panel flattening, cutting curves, making rabbets and dado and nails. There’s a bit on miters, hand-cut moulding and milk paint as well.
If you are at the beginning stages of woodworking or switching to hand-tool woodworking, I think you will find this DVD useful.
The DVD also includes a short glossary and a SketchUp file of the six-board chest that illustrates the construction steps.
