DIORAMA DISCUSSION: A Versailles Salon by Michael Williams/Haute Doll 
Part 1 of 2

Thanks to Dee and the board for inviting me back to present a behind- the-scenes view of the rococo Versailles-style salon I created as the backdrop for my shoot of Eight Beauties by Christopher Stoeckel for Haute Doll Magazine's Sept/Oct 2008 issue.

Here is the empty room minus its inhabitants:

I had such a room in mind to create for YEARS but it always takes a Haute Doll deadline to get my a** in gear and make it happen.

So I began looking through some visual source books for inspiration to do a paneled wall. This is a page from a Dover paperback book on ornamental borders, scrolls and cartouches in historic decorative styles...I looked through hundreds of designs and settled on the fleur-de-lys and cartouche in the upper left, along with what looks like a door knocker decorated with a hanging rose garland, also upper left.

I lengthened the cartouche in Photoshop and resized the other motifs...I played with the floral vase and musical lyre at right but did not end up incorporating them into this wall panel design. Here are a few more decorative motifs I considered but ultimately never used. They were scanned as black on white engraved illustrations but I then opened them in Photoshop and colorized them to this golden yellow hue.

Here is the final version of the wall panels as well.

I repeated the wall panel motif in the door and used another decoration for above the door, along with two variations on the top-of-door ornament that were never used--the last one looked too "pagoda-like" and Orientalesque, whereas I was aiming for more of a Versailles salon look.

Here I inverted the design to white and colorized the negative space in this nice Dutch or Wedgewood (or is it Napoleonic?) blue as well as white on black:

For the columns, I found this very stylized design online to begin with--but it obviously doesn't match the Dover ornamentation in level of detail and rococo flair. So I found this Corinthian column capital, which I inverted to black on white, then colorized. This is a near-final version of the column, colorized to the same golden hue as the wall panels, though I had to elongate the central stretch of column to about 18 inches.

I found this subtle green marble pattern, though I wanted it to coordinate better with the wall panels, so I colorized it as well in the final version.

I did this geometric tile design myself in PhotoShop, as the basic template for the printed tile floor I had in mind for the salon room. Here I colorized the tile floor and added some layer effects of embossing and drop shadows in Photoshop.

At first I had tried a much more densely-veined marble texture for the tiles, but felt it overwhelmed the complete set design when I installed a sample on the room's floor. So I ended up with this much lighter version with the subtle marbling from the green sample I showed earlier in this presentation.

This is the final version of the chair. I originally saw similar chairs in a diorama scene by Jakki Peters I shot for Haute Doll Magazine (www.hautedoll.com). She had customized hers by painting gold directly onto the cushions. She sold me a pair of untouched chairs whose original upholstery was an incongruent country-style floral calico. I knew I'd want a fancier fabric treatment for the Versailles Salon, so I decided to make my own OOAK "brocade" fabric on the computer. The tiny cushions on the arms of the chair were the most difficult to get right.

Thank you to fellow collector Jessica Horne, who had used this craft book decorative paper in a doll diorama photo from Doll Divas, I think, and after emailing her to ask where she got it, she actually mailed me a sheet, which I promptly scanned. I adjusted the contrast in the paper to get a better black on white, and I think also since the image was printed on laid paper (which has a line texture in it), it looked very much like a brocade fabric.

I then experimented in PhotoShop again to adjust the hue and saturation, beginning with shades of rose and crimson. But re-examining the doll fashions, mostly black with some green and red, I felt a golden hue color-coordinated with the wall panels and tile floor would be the best choice. I tried a yellow tint over the left half, above, but stuck with the yellow on white, to be printed on 8.5x11 sheets of pre-cut white cotton treated and sold to take inkjet printer ink (usually quilters).

I'm NOT a seamstress nor have I ever reupholstered anything in my life, but I took some muslin and covered the existing seat cushions to get the proper shape of the seat and chair back, which I marked on with black inkpen. This is the SEAT on the left, the BACK on the right.

I scanned it into Photoshop at 100% then designed a pattern template on another layer. This was the final pattern layout for the seat cushion.

Finally I imposed the template layer on top of the brocade pattern  (and deleted the wording, such as FRONT or TOP) before printing out onto the fabric sheets.

Please continue to Part 2.