I get asked time and time again about how I did Kylan’s wall. Was it hard? how long did it take? How did you decide on the design? What colours did you use?
So I thought I would do a post explaining how I went about it and answer all those questions in one hit to hopefully inspire some of you to take the plunge with a paintbrush and get creative! It is just paint after all, if all turns to custard you can just paint over it again and start from scratch!
As it was something I had never done before it was a learning curve and if I were to go back and do it again there are definitely things that I would do differently so lucky for you I will share with you my mistakes, what I learnt and how you can avoid running into any of the issues I faced.
So this was my blank canvas…my starting point!
*warning patience is key to this project!!
The main wall here is a darker shade of the grey on the rest of the walls. Its hard to tell the difference in this photo but you will see the difference soon. That wall on the right is actually the lighter shade. The grey I have used in the bedrooms is called ‘Geyser’. I cannot recall what shades I have used but i think off the top of my head the light colour is possible 1/4 geyser.
My vision for the wall was for the feature to subtly blend in from the rest of the room in an ombre effect, getting darker and darker creating an impact where it meets. So to start with I penciled in the pattern on the walls. I began with an outline of Kylan’s shelf where I wanted it to be, along with another outline of the shelf above his bed in case I ever wanted to change the room around and move the shelf. Once those were drawn on I took a large straight edge and just went to town drawing angles, triangles, diamonds and whatever shapes I could to create a geometric pattern.
Towards the door I tapered off the patterns diagonally down to the corner of the room. In that space above where it tapered off I painted it the light grey that is on the rest of the walls. Now here you can see the difference between the two different shades of grey. To paint this I simply used painters tape and lined it up along the pencil lines, pushing hard to make sure it was on hard against the wall so that there would be no leaking and painted away. The tape I used was a delicate one as I was going to be using it on freshly painted walls to be able to do the shapes.
It was quite tricky to get a shot of the pencil outlines on the wall as I did them faintly to avoid the pencil showing through the paint (I encountered this problem in Arden’s room) but this close up gives you an idea about how it looked.
When I asked Kylan what colour he wanted in his room he was very specific. He wanted “Aaaaqua” pronounced “ahhhhhhhhhhh kwa”. I found the perfect shade (sorry I can’t recall what it was) and to do his only wall I just used the one colour.
I used the light grey that is on the walls in the rest of his room as my base colour and then added a hint of the aqua blue to that to create my first shade. of pastel aqua.
Here is where I made my first mistake. So you have probably guessed that to get the darker shades you just keep adding a bit more blue to the previous colour to get a slightly darker shade. What I did was keep adding to the same pot. Big mistake! If you accidentally add a bit too much blue you have a real mission on your hands to try get back to a lighter shade. I found this out the hard way when I accidentally jumped to a way darker shade where it looked funny and it took me forever to try re mix my colours to get the correct colour. Once I did this once I realized that I needed to keep some of each of the previous colour used. I had lots of formula tins lying around which were perfect to use. So I would pour half of the colour just used into a tin and put it aside, then add a hint of blue to the other half of it to create my next colour and so on and so on.
here I have all my paint colours, tins and my high tech mixing equipment |
lightest shade I was working with on the right, next shade in the middle and original blue on the left. |
here is my other reason this took so long! I had to time it around nap times or quickly while he was distracted! |
Whilst fixing up these issues I ended up changing a few of my shapes as well to make it more appealing to the eye. It was like a giant puzzle that I was trying to piece together. And don’t forget that the paint always dries darker than it looks when its wet…just to keep you on your toes even more?
2 Comments
Thanks for all the info!! The wall looks amazing, you did an excellent job. I took your advice and did up my son's room with this geometric design also. I had also encounted the problem of going too dark and having to spend time trying to get the colour back. I tried to ombre it but I didn't do such a good job as you did! I got to a point where I was so over it that I didn't even try to fix it lol. Great advice about the colours looking lighter when wet, I learnt the hard way also. It took me 2 weeks of continuous painting before I finished. It did't look as great as yours but I'm still happy with it. So thank you for sharing!!
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