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!