DIY: How I Made My Hidden Design Lampshade

I took the first half of this Labor Day weekend to make good on at least one art project, and by Saturday night it was done. The idea was to take a contemporary standing lamp and make it feel a little less utilitarian and a little more personal. It shouldn’t simply be something nice to look at, either… Perhaps there should be a little “trick” to it. Figure 1 below shows a close-up of the lamp when it’s turned on.

Figure 1

The design originated on a lamp I saw in the lobby at Walt Disney’s Fort Wilderness Lodge Resort, as seen in Figure 2 A. Figure 2 B shows how I used Adobe Photoshop to correct the perspective into two rectangular panels, and Figure 2 C shows the same file after a threshold adjustment layer was added and the design was hand-brushed to a sharp black-and-white pattern. Figure 2 D is the design (as well as those for a couple other upcoming projects) printed on paper for use in the next grouping of steps in my process. I had them printed at my favorite commercial print chain, FedEx Office (formerly known as Kinko’s). There’s a fairly new one in Merritt Island that I’ve had good results with several times now.

Figure 2

Figure 3 A demonstrates why the design needed to be printed first, and at such a small size. I recently acquired a used Artograph Tracer opaque art projector via eBay. It turns any object that fits into its five-inch-square window into a considerably bright vertical projection, up to five feet square, and still remains pretty sharp in a low-light environment. The projected design is traced onto a piece of thin office paper in Figure 3 B. The paper had been cut into the same dimensions as one side of the lamp’s rectangular shade a little earlier, 8.5 by 14 inches. I used masking tape to secure the paper face-down onto the top of a glass table, and stuffed the business-end of the standing lamp beneath the glass tabletop, to act as an improvised lightbox, as seen in Figure 3 C. Figure 3 D picks up the next part of the process, in which the lampshade is set down on top of the paper, so that the design can be traced onto the inside, with permanent marker. Liberties were taken with stage to ensure the two panels (placed on adjacent sides, twice each) were completely seamless from one side to the next, and yet remained organic, with slight variations between the two instances of each design.

Figure 3

The finished project one more time, this time showing the “trick” I mentioned in the first paragraph: In daylight, with the lamp turned off, you don’t see the design. At night, when the lamp is turned on, the design on the inside of the shade is projected outward. Figure 4 is an animated GIF I made to show the transformation.

Figure 4