Post #777554 by Prikli Pear on Wed, Jul 5, 2017 12:42 PM

It's now July in Texas, which means the heat and humidity are driving me to indoor pursuits. For the next few months, there's not going to be a lot of tiki bar progress, but I'll share a bit more before the hiatus. As Bamboo Ben is so fond of say, "No white ceilings!" The patio ceiling is a dull, grayish white. Tikifying presented a unique challenge, since it's outside. Whatever we did, it had to be easy to clean, fairly durable and not be a magnet for insects and dirt. Fortunately, we had a idea what to do with it that pre-dated our tiki efforts. There's a tradition in the Southern U.S. of painting porch ceilings blue. Supposedly this discourages insects (ie mud daubers, spiders, etc.) from nesting there. The blue confuses them, thinking it's the sky, supposedly. We tried this at the old house, painting the unfinished drywall a sky blue. And it seemed to work. A section of the garage we never got around to painting did have mud dauber nests, but the painted sections stayed clean. So for the tiki porch, we'd paint the ceiling blue to simulate a marine environment.

After taping up plastic dropcloth, I did the wall/ceiling intersections with an edger, then broke out the roller for the main section. I broke two regular broom handles doing this, with the paint-filled roller falling on top of me and making me look like a Smurf before I wised up. I bought a metal pole with a metal screw thread and didn't have problems after that. I also lifted an idea from Mr. Pupu Pants, adding Valspar's color crystals (actually, very fine silver glitter) to the paint for a shimmering effect. The effect is subtle, but I'm happy with it. I wasn't so happy with the fact that a single coat wasn't enough--the color was splotchy and uneven, so I had to put a second layer over everything. It looks great now, but oh, that extra work!

You'll notice those old ceiling fans. Before, they blended into the white ceiling and were barely noticed. Against the blue, though, they're hideous. Ugh. No way we'll simply remove them, because the breeze they create is very welcome, essential even. What to do?

Problem solved! Well, for two of them, at any rate. The Wife gifted me with two tiki-appropriate ceiling fans for out anniversary. These look sooooo much nicer! The light isn't terribly tiki, but I'm taking some cues from Tiki Skip's light-making threads to eventually address that.

The blue is a definite improvement over the white, but doesn't fall within the long tiki (or tropical bar) tradition. Since we're going for a marine/aquatic vibe with the Lagoon of Mystery, I wanted to develop the idea that we're literally under the sea by painting silhouettes. This also plays into tiki's long tradition of murals. Mine's not so detailed as others', but I think it gives a distinct style to the place. I took the projector we use for our Dive-In movies and pointed it at the ceiling, projecting the silhouettes so I could outline them with a black Sharpie. Some, like Mr. Hammerhead here, were too large for a single frame and had to be broken up into sections.

I then painted in the outline with darker blue paint. Unfortunately, once I finished the sea turtle I realized all of the silhouettes would require a second coat as well. Too splotchy otherwise. But the end result is neat. My kids really like the silhouettes. But not everything works out the way I hope--that lighter random pattern by the turtle? That was supposed to be caustic ripple patterns, like you see at the bottom of a swimming pool. Didn't work. After exploring various fixes, we decided there was no viable solution, so I'm just going to paint over it. Sometimes you just have to own your mistakes and move on.

Fortunately, the manta ray isn't a mistake. It looks quite nice.

The hammerhead shark is another success. Neither the manta nor the shark have received their second coat yet, so please forgive the irregular nature of their coloring.

Because of the failure of my caustic water pattern, I now have a lot more open ceiling space than I'd planned on. Which means I need to put up more silhouettes to make the scene more busy (The ceiling space is 64' long by 10' wide, so there's a lot of ocean to fill). I'd already planned to put a mermaid at the far end, but that's going to be a lot more complicated silhouette and I haven't come up with a design I'm happy with yet. I'm pretty sure an octopus is going in there somewhere. Fortunately, this is something I can add to as inspiration strikes--I don't have to have it all at once.

As always, more photos and commentary may be found on my blog.