Typographical Chest of Drawers
From Colour Recipes for painted furniture by ANNIE SLOAN Photographs by CHRISTOPHER DRAKE Published by CICO BOOKS
You will need
• Old White paint • French Linen paint • Soft flat brush • Pencil and paper • Sticky letters for making signs (I used three different heights: 3in/75mm, 1¾in/47mm, and 1½in/35mm) • Oval bristle brush • Clear wax • Brush, to apply the wax • Clean, dry, lint-free cloths • Coarse sandpaper
There is a huge interest in typography today, although it’s really not surprising, as billboards, signs, and notices are to be seen everywhere. Many people are very knowledgeable about fonts and appreciate the beauty of old advertisements with their old-fashioned typefaces. These are now being used to decorate a lot of furniture. Inspired by several such pieces that I’d seen on social-media sites, I decided to create my own. I’d had this eccentric, probably handmade piece of furniture in my studio for many years. It had obviously once been used in a garage, as it was covered in oil, hammer and saw marks. After sealing and painting it, I used it to store my brushes and drawing materials. For a long time though, I had my eye on it as possible storage for important papers, keys, and souvenirs in the main part of the house. The eight drawers of different depths suggested to me lines of text, so I chose to decorate them with the first lines of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I love the unusual combination of words and the different shapes I make with my mouth when I speak them. The chest now stands at the top of the stairs, as the writing on the fourth drawer suggests.
79