The kitchen ceiling project turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined it would be. Detailed painting overhead is very hard. Gravity works against you at every turn. Additionally, the difficulty of attempting to position ones body in a manner to steady the hand, results in contorted stretches and isometric poses. I had made stencils to assist in drawing pencil lines where I inteneded to hand paint--that part worked great. Whereas, I am able to draw straight lines in the usual positions, I found it impossible to do so overhead. Sooooo....it was thinkng time. My solution was to slightly re-do my designs and paint them on white posterboard.  I made between 6 and 8 hand painted versions of each element. Those I took to Offce Depot and for $38 bucks had them color copied. After cutting out the design elements , I used twist up glue sticks to attach the printed paper to the beams. I then used a felt tipped paint pen to add some dark green lines between the glued up paper panels usuing a straight edge. Below are photos of the original painted panels, the copies, etc.

Color copies !!!--ain't technology great!

This photo shows my first feeble attempts at hand painting my designs--I had to figure out how to completely cover the painting I had done with the paper copies, so I had to make some adaptations to the original designs.

The finished product.