When I traveled abroad for the first time during college,  I was taken aback by all the decorative painting all over Europe. Below is one that was on the ceiling of my hostel…now cut up by the dissecting walls.

Based on my limited design exposure – growing up among the Idaho fields of potatoes – I didn’t understand how this great craft can affect an overall design of a space, raising its level of aesthetics to a higher plane of design. But now I understand.

Today I spent most of the day working on Adobe Illustrator to update our design package for a historic remodel. There were some overall design changes made to some rooms and now we needed to update the Decorative Painting (which I will call DP for short) for these rooms. I am sure, that the decorative painters that worked on the mural pictured above would roll over in their graves with the process we go through now and scheduling demands we are under, but it had to be modified to work with the Construction process of these times. Like most items that are built in an architectural environment, the GC has the responsibility to manage all scheduled items. This has great benefit to the costs of building. So, like a GC managing a sub-contractor to install tile in a building, the GC would manage a decorative painter’s work to make sure everything is prepped for them to begin and leave site in a scheduled manner without adding more cost to a project.

To meet this schedule, a lot of work has to be done on the front end. I start first working with the Owner to define the designs. You can also bring in a trained decorative painter to help either come up with the décor or at least oversee what you have done to make sure it can be applied successfully. This project has designs that were largely defined by elements historical to the building and to the time era. Once the designs are established and you have Owner buy-off, the work needs to be put into a communicative document. These can be added to the architectural sheet set, or a separate architectural specification manual. Once these are completed, they are sent out to bid by the GC to gain cost amounts from competing decorative painters. Once the bid is awarded, we work with them to adhere to the scope and its success. Below are some pictures of the process.

Once we finish the architectural elevations and plans, we show the line work of the DP on these documents. Separate large scale details need to be done to communicate the work for the bidding painters.

            

Once all the designs are completed we create a scope lists and painting schedules like these.

     

If anything changes once these documents are given to the GC and priced; like measurements or elevations to a room; these drawings need to be updated, so the GC can run the numbers on the pricing and present a price increase to the Owner if there is one. So today was spent updating changes to elevations to a number of rooms, and preparing the documents for re-pricing.