KSEL have taken a step back from the heavy duty building and restoration this month and instead have taken a more chilled and laid back response to the restoration. Digging deep to find our inner artists, KSEL have taken this month start to paint and re-do the calligraphy on the inside of the carriage.
Since the restoration began and since replacing the carriages old wood for new, we have unfortunately lost all of the quirky calligraphy in the carriage due either to the wood being replaced or being sanded down to look better, and we have decided that it is about time that it is redone. This was easier said than done. Initially we started by looking at what we had already got on the carriage walls and designed the rest of the font around what we could already see which was not much unfortunately. We then made an educated guess about the length and height of all of the letters and, based around these measurements, designed and made some initial ideas for the font of the carriage.
Once we were happy, we began to look at how to get our design onto the carriage walls easily whilst keeping the same size and dimensions that we had already. Initially we thought that making and producing a stencil for the carriage would make it easy to transfer our design onto the walls, but, when putting this in action, we thought that this could possibly make the calligraphy wonky or in-precise, and we are unable to see the spacing between the letters underneath the actual stencil itself. With this, we went back to the drawing board (literally!).
Eventually, after many attempts at success, we discovered that you are able to transfer your drawings onto wood using either a transfer or tracing paper. Quickly we began to draw up our sketches and test them as to whether they would transfer onto wood or not and how clearly it was for us to be able to see sketches once they were on the wood. From that, we could see how easy it was for us to paint them onto the carriage walls. This method proved successful and with ease we were able to place our sketches onto the carriages wall of the passengers part of the carriage. All that is left to do now is to paint them.
With this success, we moved on to the doors of the carriage, which were once painted with ‘no. 662 – Third’ on the panel at the bottom of the door. This proved slightly more difficult than that of the calligraphy on the end walls of the carriage due to the fact that we had even less to go off and the wood beneath where the calligraphy should be is new and as such we do not want to ruin it.
In order to finish the calligraphy, we began to look online for images of how the calligraphy should be done and again went and designed how we thought the calligraphy should look overall once it is done. Once we are happy with the design of this part of the calligraphy, we will begin to copy and paint the design onto the interior of the doors of the carriage.
The last part of the design will entail painting GUARD and THIRD onto the exterior of the carriage as in previous blogs (Just a little more smoothed over). Although we have not yet come up with an idea for how these will look, we are hoping to paint this at a similar time to the interior of the carriage.
