• Introduction
• Drawing
• Oil painting
• Tempera
• Watercolour
• Decoration
• Examples

Step by step example: Make a wall clock

I report here step by step work sequence to realize a wall clock decorated using decoupage technique.

Panel: wood or plywood panel shaped with the dimensions of 30cm x 40cm with a hole in the middle for the mechanism of the clock.

How to prepare the panel: Vinyl glue watered down and once it has dried water paint.

Acrilycs colours: Maimeri

Of course you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

	Preparation Before painting the panel you have to prepare it with a coat of vinyl glue watered down, which works as a woodfiller, then once it has dried up spread onto it white water paint or acrilyc plaster. Wait for the surface to dry then smooth it with sand paper.
	Picture: the background colour The paper we are going to use has Victorian angels on, and we'll set them on an azure sky as background. Let's spread a first hand of azure, obtained mixing white with some cyan blue and a bit of ultramarine blue. We will need two or three hands for the colour to be well covering.
	Decoupage: the scraps of paper Let's cut out some big pictures of angels and some smaller ones and let's lay them around the dial, which we'll set in the middle in order to centre the hole of the shape. Never be content of the sole decoupage paper, if you find other pictures of Victorian angels from other kinds of paper of course you can add them to the composition. The only important thing is to control some sort of coherence of style and tone.
	Decoupage: the dial of the clock In order to sect correctly the dial of the clock we must find the center of the circle. Let's use a ruler to make mark the 15 minutes place and the 45 minutes place and let's make a mark with a pencil near the centre.
	Let's rotate the dial and lay the ruler in order to pass on the place of 00 minutes and 30 minutes and let's make a mark with a pencil and make a cross joining together the previous marks. Now we have the center of the circle.
	Now we have to work looking at the hole of the shape against the light: let's set the paper dial onto the shape in order to see the hole for the mechanism through the piece of paper , and let's center the mark of the center of the circle with the hole.
	Pencil: guiding signs Once the dial is laid onto the right position, let's draw the side of the circle by pencil, to have a guide to work, once we'll have removed the scrap of paper.
	Let's lay the pictures of the big angels around the dial of the clock and let's make some guiding marks with the pencil for them too.
	Painting: the clouds Once we have made the guiding marks where the biggest figures will be set, we can proceed to complete the background sceene of the sky painting the clouds. Let's water down the white acrilyc and spread it onto the centre around the hole, where the dial will be glued. Then using a sponge let's fade the colours around it and let's pass over the pencil marks for the dial, and let's add some clouds in the sky near the signs of the angels, in order to frame them.
	In order to shade down the clouds we can also use a stencil brush, which makes the white more covering still mantaining a natural effect.
	Decoupage: the dial of the clock First of all let's glue the dial of the clock. We'll have to work looking against the light, as we did before, and set the center of the circle onto the hole of the shape.
	Decoupage: the angels Let's glue the angels starting from the biggest to the smallest. Then once the surface has dried up we'll make some finishing touches...
	Finishing touches The biggest angel has some overlapped flowers on his arm, it was printed this way, and we'll have to hide them painting the border of a cloud.
	We'll do the same with the two angels in tha bottom: the red angel has lo legs, so we'll finish it off in order to make it appear as if they were hidden inside the cloud, while the azure angel has no damages, so we'll just fade away the white of the cloud here and there.
	Even the smallest angel must be finished off to make it appears as if he was merging from the cloud. Once the finishing is over, it will be very difficult to understand what is painted and what is cut and pasted.
	Varnish Let's give many coats of water varnish as usual, so as not to alter the tone of the colours. Remember that we will need almost ten coats of varnish to eliminate the difference in level between the surface and the scraps, then we can smooth the surface using a fine sand paper, then give another coat of varnish or two.
	The pointers Now we can assemble the mechanism of the clock on the back of the shape, on the front we'll see just the three pointers: hours, minutes, seconds.

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