Friday, April 19, 2013

Nursery - Painting

How we painted the nursery:
At the beginning of the project, my husband and I disagreed on how to do the paintings. We watched several videos & steps. They started as sketches on my ipad and morphed into the room.

The easy steps:
  1. Remove your furniture. We gave the furniture to my parents. It’s a really nice sleigh bed. It was the first step, and boy did the room feel huge again! 


  2. Prime those walls! Our walls were a light green beforehand, so we only needed one thick layer of primer. Thanks to Mom for helping out there! We knocked that out in a few hours one afternoon. While we were priming the walls, Alex primed these two shelving structures from our original bedroom furniture. Those took an extra coat. 


  3. The next day was Green & Blue Day. Alex drew the hills on the walls with a carpenter pencil. Then we painted the top half blue & the bottom half green. Alex’s Mom helped do the cutting. So we had two people work on it and it took may 4 hours? The blue took two thick coats. The green took three healthy coats with touchups.  Meanwhile, Alex was painting the cubes, I mentioned earlier red & yellow.      

  4. I do want to note that this part is the start of where Alex & I disagreed. He said to outline the characters BEFORE doing the green & blue rather than going over. So ultimately, we both had good points. Here’s what you do for the characters (or at least what I’ve come to realize)
    1. Paint the whole room your background colors, you will have to cut in later, but it saves you from cutting in twice
    2. Draw outlines of your characters. You can do this two ways. I can’t decide which was easier. Option 1 – sketch the outlines of your characters. You’ll need to be more careful when you reprime the walls to retain your character sketches. Option 2 – put the projector on the wall of the characters & draw a big blob & prime that whole area. I did both ways, I can’t really tell you which worked better. The truffula trees were easiest by Option 1, although we did those slightly differently. 

  5. Prime the area you cut out (either just the character or the blob) 
  6. Start with the first character, turn on the projector and sketch the outlines of the character. Because you are moving your projector around, this whole process is the biggest pain. I didn’t get a single character to reline up. So your only other alternative is to draw the character, then paint, without moving the projector. I think this would take you much longer to do, especially character required multiple coats and then you have to outline. 
  7. I then moved to the next character and sketched him/her. Sometimes I did extra detail, even though I was going to paint over it. Why? I’m not sure, probably to feel slightly artistic (about tracing….). So you don’t have to do shading by any means, but anytime there is a color change, make sure you draw that line. Essentially, you’re making yourself a giant coloring book.
  8. Now the fun part. This part took hours and hours and hours. We used Acrylic paint, and the number of coats required was a pain.
    1. I ended up getting a different brand of orange which was more watery. That turned out okay, if I was doing more orange, I would not have used it.
    2. Grey – worked wonderfully, then again we had a big area to cover.
    3. Purple – wasn’t great, but we could only use a tiny brush so going over the details was a bit of a pain.
    4. Red – worked okay, but required more coats than I thought
    5. Light Blue – This went on great with only two coats
    6. Light Green – went on surprisingly well
    7. Dark Green – went on well
    8. Pink – went on well
    9. White – went on very well
    10. Dark Brown – I used a different brand, because we only needed a little bit, it wasn’t bad
    11. Light Brown – This was very watery and took quite a while
    12. “Flesh color” for Cindy Loo – I originally used the light brown, but she turned out splotchy & spray tanned…so I painted over white & used a flesh color, which worked fine.
    13. Darker Yellow – worked well
    14. Yellow – Yellow was a pain. I can’t stress that enough. I had to do a coat of the darker yellow on top of the white, to get the yellow to go on thicker. We did the Truffula trees on top of the blue & green paint. For the Yellow & Blue ones, it wasn’t a problem. This was a pain for the yellow. This was the biggest reason why we don’t have more Truffula trees…
  9. I found it helpful to go over the colors in stages. So do all of the red for the room, then another color, etc. If you need to see more progress, do one full picture. Because this part takes the longest, whatever keeps you going is best. Also, if you mess up a little bit, it’s not a problem (I found myself going, crab, where’s  the undo button several times), because you’re going to outline everything in black. 




  10. Once this dries, you can do a lot of the outlining without the projector. For the outlining I used thick & thin black sharpie oil-based paint pens. I went through 3 fat markers & 5 thin markers. A lot of this was because of the cat & the hat. When you get to the details, you’ll need to hook the projector back up to use as references/guides. This was another painful portion. Mainly because I could not ever get the picture to line back up again. The cat & the hat, was also a pain. I didn’t even know where to start. So I put the projector up and did my best. Some of the shading, I free handed, because again it was going to be a pain. Yertle, was entirely free handed, because at this point I wasn’t going to fiddle with the projector multiple times. Below are close-ups of each of the characters. 














Nursery

I haven't had a lot of projects going on in the past few (several) months. Instead, I've been growing a little human! Some days I wish it was just a project. I did several posts for this, because it just got so long! We wanted to do a Dr. Seuss themed nursery, because we aren't finding out the sex of the baby, plus Dr. Seuss is awesome. Overall, if you are planning on doing something this big it’s not necessarily hard, it’s just time consuming. Be prepared to spend many evenings & most of your weekends doing the project!









At the beginning of the project, my husband and I disagreed on how to do the paintings. We watched several videos & steps. They started as sketches on my ipad and morphed into the room, for exactly how we did it, see here!

Besides the painting, here are some of the smaller details:

We custom ordered these faceplates from ModestSheep on etsy. They were great and add a perfect touch! The room had 9 outlet covers, holy crap!


Alex spray painted the ceiling fan blades red. We were going to go red & white, but red worked out just fine!


My mom works at an art gallery and gave us this awesome glass blown globe.


The furniture is Sorelle, and a special thanks to Alex’s parents who got it for us! We ordered from Babies R Us. Getting this furniture was the biggest pain, but in the end Babies R Us refunded our delivery fee, which was nice.


My mom & grandparents got us this glider, which is beyond fabulous (I hate not having it in the living room!). Mom also found the Horton pillow which matches great! I have no idea where she got the pillow. The glider was made in the U.S.A! It came from a local furniture store.


I liked similar shelves on Ikea, and found this 9 space cube at Target for $35 (they sell the same ones at Wal-mart too), and then these four fabric bins for $18 on Amazon. I have toys in the bins and books on the shelves. The stickers came partly from the clearance rack at Tuesday Morning & the other stickers, we ordered on Amazon.


The clock was a gift from one of my showers. I absolutely adore it. I actually saw it on my registry a few days before the shower and was really excited.


The Dr. Seuss mobile is adorable and fits too. The music is a little fast, it sounds like on Super Mario Bros when time is running out.


The Burp Cloths look too cute to actually use. and UPS just dropped off a set of wash clothes & towels that match!


My aunt’s sister is fantastically talented & custom made bedding for us, which looks beyond fabulous in the room! We still have the sheet & bumper to go, but so far it looks fabulous!!



Between my mother & I, we are working on a hook rug, it's not finished, because it is taking way longer than expected! We found the idea here. It's red & white stripes. I'll update later.
The stuffed animals are from Kohls Cares! Yes, it pains me to have an alligator in our nursery. We do have a Georgia Sock Monkey in with the toys J



The banner was made by my boss for the shower she threw! You can see all of her amazing ingenuity on Bakerella!


The other banner was made by my sister-in-law, and I just love it!


My mom found these blocks on Amazon. We were expecting them to be a little bigger, but I think they add a great touch.


My sister-in-law made pinwheels for shower decorations. We took the three that had Dr. Seuss characters on it and put it in a bag one of my co-workers gave me.