Variations on a Theme in Furniture Design

Don’t you just love when you can get two for the price of one or two meals for $20 or buy one get one half off? I don’t know about you but I love a good deal and that feeling I get when I believe I’ve made a wise choice. I also love when I’ve accomplished several tasks at once – you know, killed two birds with one stone as the old saying goes. There is nothing better than getting or accomplishing more than you originally intended. Today’s post is about a variation of this topic.

Several years ago, I taught a furniture seminar in our studio on a lovely painting technique called Soft Stroke Florals. This beautiful painting technique was created by artist David Jansen and taught several years earlier in a furniture seminar at his home studio. He also has a wonderful DVD series that teaches this technique which can be found in his online catalog by clicking this link.  The DVD is 1009 Soft Stroke Florals if you are interested in learning it.

I then used this technique to teach a tilt top table to my own students.

Paul and I have a mutually agreed upon studio policy that when one of us teaches a seminar, the other one paints along. We do this so that we can support each other’s efforts and so that the teacher has an assistant in class who can help the other students, run errands if necessary and provide backup. As a result, at the end of a seminar we end up with three painted pieces that are basically the same – the classroom example painted before the seminar, the teacher’s piece and the assistant’s piece painted during the seminar. But this seminar was different. Paul and I decided that he would paint a different table then the rest of the class and he would change the design to fit a large coffee table. At the end of the two day seminar, we had the original tilt top table shown above and the following coffee table:

Two beauties for the price of one – does it get any better than this?

Thanks for visiting. Please come back soon,

Cathy

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