d.i.y. Privacy Screen

Here's the breakdown of everything I did to make the Vespere Vintage backdrop!

 ■  ■  ■ 

First, I picked up a couple of old doors from the Habitat for Humanity - which was hilarious because my car is tiny and these doors are huge. The length of one door basically took up the length of the car, so on the way home (we had to drive each door home separately) I had to fold myself up in the front seat.

I sanded them down a bit because they both had quite a bit of paint, dirt, crayons, and probably other things I don't care to think about. Washed them, hinged them together with some hardware from Home Depot, then started to glue on the moulding. 

I wanted it to look a little organic, so after I lazily glued on the moulding I added quite a bit of texture with caulking along the edges, corners, and here and there and this and that. 

Then I did quite a bit of under painting with blues and grays and crackle paints so it looked like it had had a lot of attention and paint jobs over the years. 

The moulding was painted a dark burnt sienna so the gold had a little more depth. 

I lost track of how many layers of black paint are on this guy, but I'd say three at least with different brushes and sponges. 

I dry brushed a bit of gray along the edges of the moulding and on some of texture on the black so it looked a little faded. 

The moulding has a couple of layers of gold in acrylic and then finally a layer of gold leaf. 

The appliqués are painted copper with gold leaf. 

It's hard to tell (which is kind of what I was going for) there's a laser cut wood design in the gold rectangle at the bottom. I used a ton of caulking and tissue paper on it to make it look really dingy and textured, then put a few layers of black over it to flatten it. 

There are a few parts of the doors that also have a bit of tissue paper texture under the black paint.

Many of the corners, areas surrounding the appliqués, and the moulding are dripping with burnt sienna and gray to emulate rust and fading. 

There's a layer of thick embossed wallpaper under the middle appliqué that I traced, cut out, and glued to the back of the appliqué before I glued it to the door. 

The gold lining is just paint pen carefully applied with a ruler. 

The final part, the filigree design, is a an older recycled illustration of mine that I projected onto the door and traced. The projector was probably the hardest part of all of this. It had to be adjusted exactly so in order for it to be placed on the correct area of the door, so I had to stack and and prop it up precariously on maybe three feet of books on top of a four foot shelf. Any minor movement on the doors or the projector itself would change the placement dramatically so I had to be careful. 

The doors aren't exactly the same dimensions (one is half an inch shorter and a few inches narrower) so I had to cheat the design a bit to make it appear symmetrical. 

I scribbled the designs on the doors with pencil and then filled it in with the paint pen. 

Finally, I aged it a couple more times with a few angry swipes of a wire brush.
Voilà!