After considering several possibilities for the inside of the lid I decided that the wood looked sufficiently good that just coating it with some light amber shellac would work.
The outside color extends all of the way to the bottom edge of the molding on the lid and the flap and initially I thought that it might be difficult to get a clean line between the paint and the shellac so I decided to apply the shellac to the inside of the lid first, then carefully sand the bottom edge of the molding before painting the outside of the lid. Milk paint really only adheres to bare wood so I was hoping that it would be easy to clean off any of the paint that might bleed through onto the shellac. In the end it didn't really matter because I managed to get a very clean line just by using masking tape on the molding and being very careful.
After finishing the inside of the lid I fitted the hinges to the lid and the flap.
The lid flap folded back ...
I very much like the modern aesthetic of the finish. Much as I love harpsichords overall, I've never acquired the taste for dreamy, bucolic landscapes or gilt arabesques, much less that awful Flemish block paper.
ReplyDeleteWhose milk paint did you use? The shellac looks like someone's blonde, which is great for light colored woods. Like.
Thanks! I have similar feelings about the decoration and finishing of harpsichords. I always intended this one to have a simple "two color" scheme with something lighter on the inside of the lid, but the decision to just use shellac came quite late in the day when I couldn't decide what color to use and realized that the wood itself looked good enough for a natural wood finish instead of paint. I tried a couple of different shellacs - this one is actually a "tiger amber" from Brooklyn Tool & Craft which is actually quite light in color.
ReplyDeleteThe Milk Paint is from the Old Fashioned Milk Paint Company and was finished with several coats of BLO.
I got both the paint and the shellac from Woodcraft - http://www.woodcraft.com/
I presume the white layer is also milk paint.
ReplyDeleteDid you put any kind of finish on the soundboard? The wood looks raw in the photos.
The color in some of these pictures isn't very accurate since they were taken under a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent lights and I didn't bother trying to get the white balance right ...
ReplyDeleteI think that the "white layer" that you mention is just raw unpainted wood of the outside of the lid.
The soundboard does not have any finish on it - Zuckermann suggest sealing the soundboard with a very light wash of shellac but TPW recommends leaving it completely unfinished which is what I did.