Nursery for a Friend

I was asked to paint a mural in a friends baby room . . . and of course I said yes!!! So here are the pictures from beginning to end - so you can see the process.

I don't normally do this because people will inevitably make dumb comments like - are you going to fix that, or paint that, or what's wrong with the color, or something else - to which I feel like responding. . .. It's the middle of the process Captain Obvious, thank you for your comments - now please leave before I paint your mouth closed. . . .

Just kidding - that's never happened before - but it could.

Anyways. . . for my own purposes and curiosity I thought I would document the process and now you get to benefit, or at least get a peek into the process if you were ever curious about what goes into painting a nursery.

I have a confession before I say anything else. I can't draw large scale for the life of me. Even when I'm doing my yard art it's all drawn using my transparency machine. For all those non-teachers, it's a machine that takes a small image drawn on a clear page and shoots it out larger - whether that's on a white board for teacher, a piece of plywood for my yard art, or a blank wall for murals.

My God given gift has always been the painting aspect - not the drawing. I completely took the image from someone else and made it my own through the painting.

So now that the originality confession is out of the way - on to process.

First - it's tracing time. I didn't really take pictures of that - but I did of the blank wall - and that's what you see here. Well- I've traced on it - but you can't really see it (kinda the point). . . moving on.

Then I painted the tree next. Generally, you want to paint the things in the background before you paint the foreground. That way you don't have to paint AROUND objects, you can just paint on TOP of objects. Makes for cleaner lines. As you can see though, I did leave blank spots for the owls that will come later. this allows clean lines - but not complete cover up. Because the wall was painted with a semi-gloss paint, and the paint I was using wasn't all that thick I needed to do several layers on some of the smaller branches.

Next - I painted the bottom color on all the leaves. Again with the whole - painting from the bottom up. I won't lie, all the textures scared me at first, but I just took it a step at a time. For the polka dots, I at first tried the bottom of a paint brush - but it wasn't uniform, and the dots were really small. Then I tried a small brush. Well that turned out not uniform and more oval than round. So I went to plan C. I remembered I had Q-tips in my purse. I busted out a few and viola!! I had to repaint with the base paint on the practice leaf, but from there it was gold. The big polka dot leaves were no problem with a normal brush and then came the plaid. I was was most nervous about these - but I ended up just doing a cross hatch pattern with a shade darker than the base, and when that was dry I painted a square of a shade darker than the cross hatch where they intersected. I didn't worry to much about straight lines. . I just went with the flow. :)

The first picture is the first layer - the next picture is the finished product for the leaves.

The next step was starting the owls. Now - I want to say that I took creative license when it came to the owls - between the colors and the design - but ultimately I liked the end product. The first picture you'll see is the start of them. My goal that night was to get the whole first layer done - but after painting all day, I was sore and tired - and dang it - I just wanted to sleep! hahaha. Just kidding. . . .anyways. Rant over. The next picture is of the complete first layer for them - with a cheat look at one of them completed. He was so cute - I just couldn't help myself. Then the last one is an up close after they were finished.

After this I added a few birds and butterflies around the room. I used the same process of layering. Starting with a solid bottom layer and then painting the design on top. I used the same colors and patters so as to tie them in rather than them be after thoughts plopped around the room.

This is a picture of the final tree with the birds, as well as one of the butterflies (He was my favorite!!) :)

Hope you enjoyed this step by step!! I've enjoyed sharing! Remember - anyone can do it - you just need a transparency machine! haha.