Barbara Krasner-Khait looks at the development of wallcoverings
"Of paper there are divers sorts, finer and coarser, as also brown and blue paper, with divers designs that are printed for the hanging of rooms; truly they are very pretty, and make houses of the more ordinary people look neat." - John Houghton, Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1669)
THE TRADITION OF wall decoration dates back to Egyptian and Roman wall painting. Centuries later, and particularly in cooler climates, people used fabric to cover walls and windows to keep drafts out. In the homes of the well-to-do, these fabrics were elaborate, resplendent tapestries, which also adorned the walls of European palaces and castles. They were not only practical, but decorative.
A Cheap Substitute
Wallpaper began as a cheap substitute for tapestry and paneling. Some historians believe that the use of wallpaper dates back to the 1400s. The first wallpapers were decorations for wood panels, introduced into England by Flemish craftsmen. The papers were small squares with images printed by wood blocks, which were then colored in by hand. As the desire increased to find a less expensive alternative to the wall-hangings of the rich, printers produced simple yet decorative paper panels.
In the 1500s, the wealthy continued to cover their walls but now they did so with brocades, velvets and even embossed leather. The earliest known wallpaper in England dates back to 1509 - an Italian-inspired woodcut pomegranate design printed on the back of a proclamation issued by Henry VIII. Discovered in 1911 at Christ's College in Cambridge, the paper is attributed to Hugo Goes, a York printer. In general, wallpaper of this period depicted floral designs and murals. Wallpaper's popularity increased in Elizabethan England. Throughout Europe, a fascination began with these fine papers that offered protection against dampness and an improved ability to handle fireplace smoke.
But wallpaper wasn't purely a Western invention. The Chinese began to produce it in the early 1600s, showered with painted birds, flowers and landscapes on rice paper formed in rectangular sheets.
A Period Of Innovation
The 1600s introduced a period of French innovation leading to wide acceptance of wallpaper. Writer Savary des Bruslons noted "a dominotier makes a type of tapestry on paper . . . which is used by the poorer classes in Paris to cover the walls of their huts or their shops." Such dominotiers gained the reputation of experts in emulating fabric on paper.
Papers of this period fell into two classes, irrespective of whether they were produced in England or France: simple and complicated. The simple typically depicted a geometric pattern repeat, printed from a single wood block. The complicated consisted of more complex designs, including shields, vases or flowers and were created from several blocks. Either way, designs were first printed in black onto the paper. Using a kind of stencil, color was applied. The less expensive papers were printed less carefully from worn blocks and sold at rural fairs. The more costly papers were produced from carefully carved, new wooden blocks and were printed and colored carefully as well.
The 1600s also marked the debut of flock paper. Flock is the small shearing of wool left over from the manufacture of cloth. The process involved painting the background color onto paper or canvas, printing or stenciling the design onto it with a slow-drying adhesive, and scattering the flock over the adhesive, producing a velvet-like pile over the chosen design. The practice began about 1600 but enjoyed its heyday from 1715-45 when exceptional quality paper of this type was imported from France into England.
Though called wallpaper, the paper was not attached directly to the wall during this period. Instead, it was pasted onto linen and the linen was then attached to the walls with copper tacks. Sometimes the linen was attached to wooden battens, which were then attached to the walls.
From the 1680s, wallpaper offered an economical alternative to tapestries and leather hangings. Individual sheets were joined together in groups of 12 or more to form a roll, enabling faster printing and complex designs. New production techniques also meant that hanging paper required more skill.
Color My World
By the beginning of the 1700s, simple black and white papers had virtually disappeared in Europe. Colored papers were in vogue, especially imported paper from China.
In France, wallpapers evolved from the end papers used in bookbinding. The first ones were printed in small squares in marbleized patterns. Eventually, the squares were glued together into a long sheet and rolled up for convenience. Wallpaper became a royal affair. In 1778, Louis XVI issued a decree that required the length of a wallpaper roll be about 34 feet.
Patterns imitated scenic tapestries, brocatelles and patterned velvets. Americans often imported these papers. For instance, the wallpaper in the Duncan House in Haverhill, MA was designed by Carle Vernet and printed in Paris about 1814. Made of separate panels, it shows a single scene of a hunt.
The French continued to innovate and invented a machine to print paper in 1785. Wallpaper design began to attract artists and not just woodblock printers. Chinese paper continued its popularity and its style of hand-painted birds, trees, pagodas and sometimes Chinese figures in landscapes became known as chinoiserie. The paper found its way into manor houses, palaces and chateaux. It was usually applied in panels and was sometimes edged with gilt. European painters copied the Chinese designs, but the French-produced papers were the most sought after.
At first, wallpaper appeared in minor rooms while fabric continued to be used in the major ones. Use of wallpaper became so widespread that it inspired the introduction of a tax in England by 1712 on paper that was "painted, printed or stained to serve as hangings".
Most papers of this time imitated textiles and their manufacturers boasted that they could emulate damask, velvet and needlework. One major designer of this period was John Baptist Jackson, born in 1700, and a pupil of the engraver Kirkhall. In 1725 he went to Paris and came into contact with paper stainer Jean Michel Papillon before he went on to Italy and became interested in Italian Renaissance design. In 1746, he returned to England, determined to revive English wallpaper printing, which had taken a beating from the French.
Dawn of the Designer
The French had taken over the industry. They paid their designers well and French nobility paid special commissions for custom papers. One manufacturer deserves special mention, Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, who became a "Manufacture Royale". For some years before the French Revolution, his factory in Paris produced the finest and most beautiful papers for the French aristocracy. It was attacked by the angry mob in 1789 and Réveillon fled to England. The factory reopened with the help of others who found favor with the Revolutionaries by printing patriotic papers in red, white and blue. Réveillon took his inspiration from painted decoration on wooden paneling, doors and shutters - a style originated by Raphael in the Vatican. His designs featured long vertical and graceful designs of urns, flowers, swans, birds and beasts block-printed in dozens of different colors, and flowing upward from a central motif. His papers were to be hung as panels, separated by borders and plain wallpaper sections. He also introduced papers that used strong colors - reds, ochres, terracottas, greens and azure blues - in addition to the traditional black. Classical motifs, medallions and dancing figures filled the panel area. Réveillon papers became a popular export to the US during the 1700s and can still be seen in New England homes.
A Taxing Situation
Meanwhile, back in England, wallpapers were being colored by hand on the wall to outwit the tax man. The industry continued to grow in spite of the taxes and grew strong enough that by 1773, Parliament lifted the ban on imported papers, though customs duties still applied. Taxation continued into the next century and generated a significant amount of revenue. By 1806, falsification of wallpaper stamps was added to the list of offenses punishable by death. To deal with the tax, English manufacturers sought to increase sales by catering to the mass market. They simplified their designs. This allowed the French to maintain their firm grip on the finer, more complicated designs.
Dramatic Design
The use of wallpaper borders is almost as old as wallpaper itself. Borders, originally used to hide the tacks used to hold the wallpaper in position, assumed their own importance by the late 1700s, because they could visually alter a room's proportions. Border designs featured florals and architectural friezes. Many of these were printed to look like a cornice and hung at a junction of the wall and ceiling to add importance and grandeur to the room. Often, they were used to outline doors and windows or architectural details within the room such as a fireplace.
By the beginning of the 1800s, dividing the wall into three parts - the dado, filler and frieze - became fashionable. Borders differentiated each section, which bore distinctive yet interrelated patterns. This style is often seen in Victorian homes.
Stripes - reminiscent of a military campaign with their military colors - became popular in Napoleonic France and in England, not only on the walls but extending to the ceilings as well. The practice spread throughout Europe. Panoramic landscapes were also popular in France. Never before had designs been attempted on such a large scale. To cover the walls of a large room without repeating a scene, 20 to 30 lengths were printed, with each length about 10 feet high and 20 inches wide (300cm by 50cm). Massive amounts of time and energy, not to mention risk, were required to print such scenes, using thousands of hand-carved blocks and hundreds of colors. For the most part, the Zuber company in Rixheim and Dufour in Mâcon and Paris produced them. In 1852, Zuber took advantage of a nationalist wave in the US and republished a previous paper, "Views of North America", as "The War of American Independence". He substituted foreground figures so the Boston Harbor became the Boston Tea Party. Peaceful scenes became battlefields.
Landscapes were not common in England as they did not accommodate the ancestral portraits the British preferred as wall decoration.
The British Revolution
It was now Britain's turn to innovate. The repeal of wallpaper taxation in 1836 encouraged designers in England to produce very complex designs that became popular in the Victorian era. And a breakthrough in production, credited to a calico printing firm, Potters of Darwen in Lancashire, England, adapted a printing machine for wallpaper, patented in 1839. Wallpaper was now applied directly to plaster. As production increased, prices dropped, and more and more people were able to buy it for their homes. Wallpaper suitable for a child's nursery appeared. In the Victorian era, front halls boasted bright colors that often included wallpaper. By the late 1800s, British designers like William Morris and Owen Jones, author of The Grammar of Ornament (1856), began to react against the excesses of the mid-century. They wanted to restore good taste and re-establish quality workmanship. Morris, for example, insisted on the purest colors and techniques and his influence is evident in the hundreds of mass-produced papers manufactured from the 1880s until the end of the century.
By the 1920s, futurist and cubist designs arrived on the market making both modern and traditional patterns available. Elite society reverted to using fabric like silk and paint finishes, considering paper inferior. Practical innovations continued such as vinyl wallpaper's appearance in 1947 and pre-pasted papers in the 1950s.
It's the most boring part of the decorating process, but getting rid of that old gloss-painted woodchip is the first thing to tackle if you want to redecorate. The good news is that a steam stripper makes the job easy.
Time to complete job: One day for a small to medium room. Remember to allow another half day to fill any holes and cracks and sand rough areas before redecorating.
Approximate budget: Budget steam strippers cost £20 from the DIY stores.
Safety: Make sure you have an RCD adaptor to fit between the stream stripper and your socket, unless your house wiring is RCD-protected. Never use steam strippers near power sockets or switches.
Before you start: Remove as much furniture from the room as possible and lay dust sheets around the area to be stripped to protect the floor. Open any windows and close all internal doors.
-
Step 1: Preparation
To allow the water and steam to work on the paper, perforate the surface with a wallpaper scorer. You can use a craft knife to score the paper but don't press too hard or the plasterwork will be damaged.
Tip: If you don't have a steam stripper, soak the walls with warm water and leave the paper to soften for twenty minutes before stripping. -
Step 2: Using the steam stripper
Turn on the steam stripper and work methodically across the first wall, moving the pad onto sections of the wall and removing the dampened areas with a scraper.
Tip: Try to work from the top to the bottom of the wall so that the water from the stripper will drip onto the paper to be stripped. -
Step 3: Finishing
Work across the room, taking off ribbons of stripped paper with the scraper. Some areas may need extra work with the steam pad.
Tip: When the paper has been removed, a residue of old glue is often left on the wall surface. This can ruin your new finish so use a nylon abrasive pad and plenty of hot soapy water to thoroughly scrub the walls.
Wallpaper (also desktop picture and desktop background) is an image used as a background of a graphical user interface on a computer screen or mobile communications device. On a computer it is usually for the desktop, while for a mobile phone it is usually the background for the 'home' or 'idle' screen. Though most devices comes with a default picture, the user can usually change it to a file of their choosing. "Wallpaper" is the term used in Microsoft Windows before Windows Vista (where it is called the Desktop "Background"), while Mac OS X calls it a "desktop picture" (previously, the term desktop pattern was used to refer to a small pattern that was repeated to fill the screen).
History
The X Window System was one of the earliest systems to include support for an arbitrary image as wallpaper via the xsetroot program, which at least as early as the X10R3 release in 1985 could tile the screen with any solid color or any binary-image X BitMap file. In 1989, a free software program called xgifroot was released that allowed an arbitrary color GIF image to be used as wallpaper, and in the same year the free xloadimage program was released which could display a variety of image formats (including color images in Sun Rasterfile format) as the desktop background. Subsequently a number of programs were released that added wallpaper support for additional image formats and other features, such as the xpmroot program (released in 1993 as part of fvwm) and the xv software (released in 1994).
The original Macintosh operating system only allowed a selection of 8×8-pixel binary-image tiled patterns; the ability to use small color patterns was added in System 5 in 1987. MacOS 8 in 1997 was the first Macintosh version to include built-in support for using arbitrary images as desktop pictures, rather than small repeating patterns.
Windows 3.0 in 1990 was the first version of Microsoft Windows to come with support for wallpaper customization, and used the term "wallpaper" for this feature. Although Windows 3.0 only came with 7 small patterns (2 black-and-white and 5 16-color), the user could supply other images in the BMP file format with up to 8-bit color (although the system was theoretically capable of handling 24-bit color images, it did so by dithering them to an 8-bit palette). In the same year, third-party freeware was available for the Macintosh and OS/2 to provide similar wallpaper features otherwise lacking in those systems. A wallpaper feature was added in a beta release of OS/2 2.0 in 1991.
Live wallpaper
A 'live wallpaper' is a type of application that works on a mobile device using the Android operating system. The application works as a wallpaper – providing the background image for the home screen—but also works as a conventional application since it can provide user-interaction with the touch screen (allowing the image to change dynamically, for example) and access other hardware and software features within the device (accelerometer, GPS, network access, etc.). There are also applications for changing automatically the Desktop Wallpaper like the Wallch, Desktop Drapes and Wally.
Similar functionality could be found in the Active Desktop feature of Windows 98 and later versions.
Around 4000 B.C., the earliest known form of "paper" was introduced: Egyptian papyrus. Wallpaper actually began in ancient China, first because the Chinese invented paper, and secondly because they glued rice paper onto their walls as early as 200 B.C. In 105 A.D., the Chinese court official Ts'ai Lun, invented papermaking from textile waste, i.e. from rags. This was the birth of paper as we know it today.
Some time in the 8th century, several Chinese prisoners with papermaking skills worked under Arabs, who in turn, spread the knowledge of papermaking throughout the Middle East. By the 10th century, Arabians were substituting linen fibers for wood and bamboo, creating a finer sheet of paper. Paper now reached a much higher quality level. During 12th century, papermaking had spread throughout Europe.
A Sudanese man illuminates hieroglyphs in an ancient tomb in Al Kurru. Sudan is strewn with the ruins of Nubian kings, who once ruled all of Egypt. Today, Sudan's government struggles to control its own country, paralyzed by decades of civil, ethnic, and religious conflict.
The earliest European pictorial block prints were religious souvenirs known today as "helgen". The oldest known, a representation of the Virgin, is dated 1418. It is now in the Royal Library at Brussels. This type of printing method may have also been used by the Chinese as early as the 5th century.
Jean Bourdichon painted 50 rolls of paper with angels on a blue background for Louis XI of France in 1481. King Louis ordered the portable wallpaper because he found it necessary to move frequently from castle to castle. Other well-heeled Europeans commissioned artists to paint paper for their walls, but real wallpaper can hardly be said to have existed till the advent of the printing press.
The earliest know fragment of European wallpaper that still exists today was found on the beams of the Lodge of Christ's College in Cambridge, England and dates from 1509. It is an Italian inspired woodcut pomegranate design printed on the back of a proclamation issued by Henry VIII. The paper is attributed to Hugo Goes, a printer in York. A guild of paperhangers was first established in France in 1599.
Jean-Michel Papillon, a French engraver and considered the inventor of wallpaper, started making block designs in matching, continuous patterns in 1675, and wallpaper as we know it today was on its way. The oldest existing example of flocked wallpaper comes from Worcester and was created in approximately 1680.
The manufacturing methods developed by the English are significant, and the products from 18th century London workshops became all the rage. At first, fashion conscious Londoners ordered expensive hand painted papers that imitated architectural details or materials like marble and stucco, but eventually wallpapers won favor on their own merits. Borders resembling a tasseled braid or a swag of fabric were often added, and flocked papers that looked like cut velvet were immensely popular.
Wallpaper came to America in 1739, when Plunket Fleeson began printing wallpaper in Philadelphia. In early America, colonials copied European fashions. After the Revolutionary War, Americans set up workshops of their own. Paper was all the fashion, from neoclassical looks to rambling roses. American firms made their share of patriotic "commemorative" papers, which we have come to know from trunk linings and bandboxes.
In 1778, Louis XVI issued a decree that required the length of a wallpaper roll be about 34 feet. Frenchmen, Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf invented the first machine for printing wallpaper in 1785. Frenchmen, Nicholas Louis Robert invented a way to make an endless roll of wallpaper around the same time. In 1798, lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in Solnhofen, Germany.
By the 1800s, French scenic papers printed with hand-carved blocks, some taking as many as 5,000 blocks to produce, were popular. In 1839, the English invented a four color surface printing machine with designs hand-cut on cylinders that could print 400 rolls a day. It was invented by the Charles Harold Potter of the calico printing firm Potters & Ross of Darwen in Lancashire, England. By 1850, eight color printing was available and in 1874, the twenty color printing machine was invented.
In 1879, gravure printing, also known as Intaglio, was invented by Karl Keitsch in Austria. In 1888, Ferdinand Sichel developed the first ready-to-use wallpaper paste. In 1890, flexographic printing is invented in England. Wallpaper pasting machines first appeared around the turn of the 20th century.
Silkscreen printing is said to have originated in Japan and China between 960-1280. Although, it was first patented in England by Samuel Simon in 1907. The first mechanical silkscreen machine was invented in 1920.
In the Victorian era, rooms paraded print upon print, mostly in garish colors, and the advent of machine-made wallpaper put the cabbage rose and arabesque patterns within the budget range of practically every home. Artisans such as Louis Comfort Tiffany and William Morris and their lyrical interpretations of nature, hand-printed by the wood block method, came to symbolize Art Nouveau. The Victorian Era, as one would expect, was a grand time for wallpaper featuring over embellished designs featuring somber colors, but it was in the roaring '20s that wallpaper really took the spotlight for the first time. Known as the Golden Age of Wallpaper, some 400 million rolls were sold during that period.
In 1936, cellulose derivative Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) made its market debut as Henkel-Zellkleister Z 5, a paste powder that was soluble in cold water.
After World War II, the entire industry was revolutionized with the appearance of plastic resins which offered stain resistance, washability, durability and strength. In 1974, the National Guild of Professional Paperhangers was established in the United States.
Modernism frowned on embellishments, so wallpaper fell into disfavor during much of this century. But as the 20th century ebbs and the bane of cookie-cutter homes and sterile work environments is upon us, some have rediscovered the romance and beauty of patterned walls.
Recent advances in digital, photo, and printing technologies have allowed modern printing facilities to replicate historic papers and other digital media on a variety of substrates.
Of course, one should no longer talk about wallpaper. Now it's wallcoverings, for technology has stepped in and created products that incorporate miracle compounds that make them washable, long lasting, pre-pasted, and yet so true to the best of history's worldly arts. So, companies can reproduce any style of any period. And unlike the costly fresco paintings, tapestries and hand-painted papers of the past, today's wallcoverings are very affordable.
Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain (so that it can be painted), textured (such as Anaglypta), or with patterned graphics.
Wallpaper printing techniques include surface printing, gravure printing, silk screen-printing, rotary printing, and digital printing. Mathematically speaking, there are seventeen basic patterns, described as wallpaper groups, that can be used to tile an infinite plane. All manufactured wallpaper patterns are based on these groups. A single pattern can be issued in several different colorways.
Wallpaper, using the printmaking technique of woodcut, gained popularity in Renaissance Europe amongst the emerging gentry. The elite of society were accustomed to hanging large tapestries on the walls of their homes, a tradition from the Middle Ages. These tapestries added color to the room as well as providing an insulating layer between the stone walls and the room, thus retaining heat in the room. However, tapestries were extremely expensive and so only the very rich could afford them. Less well-off members of the elite, unable to buy tapestries due either to prices or wars preventing international trade, turned to wallpaper to brighten up their rooms.
Early wallpaper featured scenes similar to those depicted on tapestries, and large sheets of the paper were sometimes hung loose on the walls, in the style of tapestries, and sometimes pasted as today. Prints were very often pasted to walls, instead of being framed and hung, and the largest sizes of prints, which came in several sheets, were probably mainly intended to be pasted to walls. Some important artists made such pieces, notably Albrecht Dürer, who worked on both large picture prints and also ornament prints intended for wall-hanging. The largest picture print was The Triumphal Arch commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and completed in 1515. This measured a colossal 3.57 by 2.95 metres, made up of 192 sheets, and was printed in a first edition of 700 copies, intended to be hung in palaces and, in particular, town halls, after hand-coloring.
Very few samples of the earliest repeating pattern wallpapers survive, but there are a large number of old master prints, often in engraving of repeating or repeatable decorative patterns. These are called ornament prints and were intended as models for wallpaper makers, among other uses.
England and France were leaders in European wallpaper manufacturing. Among the earliest known samples is one found on a wall from England and is printed on the back of a London proclamation of 1509. It became very popular in England following Henry VIII's excommunication from the Catholic Church - English aristocrats had always imported tapestries from Flanders and Arras, but Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church had resulted in a fall in trade with Europe. Without any tapestry manufacturers in England, English gentry and aristocracy alike turned to wallpaper.
During the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, the manufacture of wallpaper, seen as a frivolous item by the Puritan government, was halted. Following the Restoration of Charles II, wealthy people across England began demanding wallpaper again - Cromwell's regime had imposed a boring culture on people, and following his death, wealthy people began purchasing comfortable domestic items which had been banned under the Puritan state. In 1712, during the reign of Queen Anne, a wallpaper tax was introduced which was not abolished until 1836. By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was the leading wallpaper manufacturer in Europe, exporting vast quantities to Europe in addition to selling on the middle-class British market. However this trade was seriously disrupted in 1755 by the Seven Years War and later the Napoleonic Wars, and by a heavy level of duty on imports to France.
In 1748 the English ambassador to Paris decorated his salon with blue flock wallpaper, which then became very fashionable there. In the 1760s the French manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon hired designers working in silk and tapestry to produce some of the most subtle and luxurious wallpaper ever made. His sky blue wallpaper with fleurs-de-lys was used in 1783 on the first balloons by the Montgolfier brothers. The landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Pillement discovered in 1763 a method to use fast colours. Towards the end of the century the fashion for scenic wallpaper revived in both England and France, leading to some enormous panoramas, like the 1804 20 strip wide Panorama, designed by the artist Jean-Gabriel Charvetfor the French Manufacture Joseph Dufour et Cie showing the Voyages of Captain Cook. One of this famous so called papier peint wallpaper is still in situ in Ham House, Peabody Massachusetts. Beside Joseph Dufour et Cie other French manufacturers of panoramic scenic and trompe l'œil wallpapers, Zuber et Cie and Arthur et Robert exported their product across Europe and North America. Zuber et Cie's c. 1834 design Views of North America is installed in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. Like most of eighteenth century wallpapers, this was designed to be hung above a dado.
Hand-blocking wallpapers like these are manufactured by using a centuries old method in which wallpaper is hand-printed from hand-carved blocks on paper. Hand-blocked wallpaper depicted scenes include, panoramic views of antique architecture, exotic landscapes and pastoral subjects, as well as repeating patterns of stylized flowers, people and animals. The 1797 founded French company Zuber et Cie in Rixheim, France is the only company in the world which still manufactures woodblocked wallpaper.
In 1785 Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf had invented the first machine for printing coloured tints on sheets of wallpaper. In 1799 Louis-Nicolas Robert patented a machine to produce continuous lengths of paper, the forerunner of the Fourdrinier machine. This ability to produce continuous lengths of wallpaper now offered the prospect of novel designs and nice tints being widely displayed in drawing rooms across Europe.
During the Napoleonic Wars , trade between Europe and Britain evaporated, resulting in the gradual decline of the wallpaper industry in Britain. However, the end of the war saw a massive demand in Europe for British goods which had been inaccessible during the wars, including cheap, colourful wallpaper. The development of steam-powered printing presses in Britain in 1813 allowed manufacturers to mass-produce wallpaper, reducing its price and so making it affordable to working-class people. Wallpaper enjoyed a huge boom in popularity in the nineteenth century, seen as a cheap and very effective way of brightening up cramped and dark rooms in working-class areas. By the early twentieth century, wallpaper had established itself as one of the most popular household items across the Western world. During the late 1980s though, wallpaper began to fall out of fashion in lieu of Faux Painting which can be more easily removed by simply re-painting.
