If you visited Rambling Renovators last Friday, you saw pictures of my newly redone
guest bathroom. A guest bath that I began working on several months ago. I haven't done
a post on the details of how I drew/painted the 'wallpaper', so I thought we would talk
about it today.
Before:
Ugh!
First, we tiled the floor and installed some 'faux' wainscoting Check out this post to see
these steps.
I painted the wall {and ceiling} a really pale blue. {If anyone is interested in the color, email
me, and I'll go look!}
Then the fun part--creating my Sharpie art!
Instead of spending a fortune on my favorite Schumacher wallpaper, I decided to draw it
on my walls instead. I printed off a picture of the Schumacher wallpaper that I used as
my inspiration and taped it to the wall to refer to.
If you really like a wallpaper, you can find out its repeat. In this particular
paper, this is the distance {left to right} from one butterfly/bird to the next identical
butterfly/bird.
I could have easily just free-formed it, but I really liked the look of the wallpaper, the size
of the birds, and the amount of color. So, I stayed fairly consistent to it's repeat. Schumacher
has a cool site where you can actually zoom in on the pattern.
To make the process a little quicker, I zoomed in on each bird and butterfly to the exact same
'zoom level' I then printed each off onto a piece of cardstock to use as a pattern.
My vertical area was only 34" so nothing was repeated up and down. Once I traced around
a bird, then an identical bird was traced 27" to the right and 27" to the left. After penciling
in about a 6 ft area, I started sketching in the branches.
Using Sharpies on a wall is a little daunting at first, but they work really well.
After all the branches and leaves were done, I used white paint to fill in all of the birds and
butterflies. This is not a necessary step, it just helped me to make sure I liked the placement
of it all.
{you have to look really hard to see the faint white}
It took several coats of craft paint to fill in the birds and butterflies.
After the paint was dry, I went back and added black details with the Sharpie.
{Hint-- try to end your pattern in a corner that is the least conspicuous}
It took an incredible number of hours to finish, but I am really happy with the results
and the $600 I pocketed from not buying the wallpaper.
A set of crosstitched vintage framed birds and a $8 Goodwill brass lamp finish
off the other side of the bathroom.
I'm still waiting to find the perfect little vintage chandy, and then I can check this
room off my {long} list!
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