Choosing a theme: My husband and I painted murals on the walls of his sister's room two years ago before she was born. For her, we choose a Winnie-the-Pooh theme. We picked out some images from a book we had. Unfortunately, the pictures in the book were water colors, and her walls were textured. I wouldn't say they were highly textured, but they were textured enough to make the kind of detail in a water color image impossible to reproduce. This time I knew I had to choose images with a resolution similar to a coloring book. At first I wanted to do an under-the-water theme with images of the Great Barrier Reef as seen in the hit movie Finding Nemo because Fisher-Price has some really cute aquarium-themed toys and accessories, but my husband has a collection of Chevron Cars and no other place to store them and display them other than Jason's room, so we decided to decorate the whole room around these collectible toys.
Here are two examples of the Chevron Cars in my husband's collection. He has dozens more. These two happen to be named Frankie 4-Wheeler and Freddy 4-Wheeler. Frankie 4-Wheeler and Freddy 4-Wheeler come in packages that look like this. When you put them next to each other, the images actually line up. This image of a mountain road is the mural I plan to paint in Jason's room. When it is finished, it will wrap around three walls.02/16/2005: The first thing I did was to create a photocopy of the images show above. I blew up the image about 200%, and then I drew a one-inch grid over the image. I measured the walls and choose a scale of 1:10, and I drew a 10-inch grid on the wall. Then, I began sketching out the image using the grid to keep everything in scale.
02/18/2005: Here you can see the four basic colors of the mural: blue sky and water, green grass, purple mountains and brown roads. I will add dark green trees, white snow, yellow sun and gray stones before I am finished.Mistake Number One: buying paint. The entire civilized world probably already knows this, but just in case you can learn from my mistakes, here's the first one I made. When I walked in Lowes Home Improvement store, I went straight to the paint section and I started trying to match the colors on my package with the samples displayed on the wall. The colors I was looking at were all beautiful, designer colors, and there was sign clearly indicating that these colors were exclusively mixed in the American Tradition Signature paint. Well, I was actually looking for American Tradition. That's the paint we used two years ago for Samantha's room, but the Signature paint was $26 per gallon while the regular American Tradition was $10 per gallon. How could I get them to mix colors in the regular American Tradition paint? Well, I was looking at about four different palettes and they all said the same thing about being mixed exclusively in the Signature paint, and it was late, and I needed to find these colors. I didn't want to be at this all night, so I just set to work at it, and I finally found four colors that I like very much, and I took them up to the paint guy and he started mixing them for me. While he mixed my paint, I wandered around looking for brushes and things. As soon as I turned around I saw two more displays of color samples! They had been right behind me the whole time! They were much larger displays with lots more colors, it would have been much easier to find colors that I liked, and they would have mixed them in the less expensive paint. Live and learn. I spent $75 on paint hat should have cost me $30, but it's really good paint, and my baby's worth it!
Mistake Number Two: ball point pen. I looked all over the house for a pencil to draw the grid and sketch on the wall, but I couldn't find one. All I could find was a ball point pen, so that's what I used. I should have gone back to the store and bought some pencils because the ink leaked right through my super paint. I went over it several times and that helped, but I will have to try touching up with some sealer-primer to get the ink to disappear entirely.
