Wall Flower
October 12, 2021|Home Renovation
It's finished!
I DID IT! It's far from perfect but for someone who has no art skills I’m so proud of myself for how it turned out! It was fun and relaxing but also stressful and extremely time consuming but I’m so happy without it turned out! If you’re thinking this looks amazing but don’t have the skills to do it yourself, you are 100% wrong because I did it so that means you can too and here’s how!
There's something about a blank wall and canvas that inspires creativity!
1. Find Inspiration
There’s no right or wrong way to do this but if you’re a visual person like me you need to see what it’s (roughly) going to look like before you start. Pinterest is always my go to, but I won’t lie, it feels short for me this time. I assume it’s because most normal people would just put wallpaper up instead of painting a 11ft of flowers on a wall in their kids’ bedroom. I found my inspiration from fellow IGers @ourfullerhome primarily and Cloe Thomson. I would highly recommend you check out her page, she also did a very pretty and less intensive rainbow wall for her other daughter which I loved as well and might tackle in a future house if the girls ever get their own room. Or if I decide to redecorate- which happens more often than I’d like to admit. Anyway, here are a few things you should consider and look for:
· Shapes and Sizes – how many different types of flowers do you want on the wall? Do you want them to all be the same size and style but in different colours or do you have a variety? I would probably recommend a variety since flowers aren’t all the same size but to each their own. Choosing how many different types of flowers you want helps determine the number of colours you need.
· Colours - I’m pro neutrals everywhere else in my house but in the girl’s room I wanted fun, colours but something that wouldn’t overpower the rest of the décor, so I decided to go with a pastel colour pallet.
My pastel colour pallet. Message me if you'd like the colour codes for your own paint project.
· Layout – how crazy are you going with this project? Do you want a lot of white space with just a few flowers or are you going to the other extreme where you don’t want to see anything other than the flowers? If you’re going for the latter, I recommend very large flowers.
Practise attempt #1 - Glad I tried it first because I realized I didn't know how to draw lavender and it didn't seem to fit with the look I was going for.
2. Plan and Practise
I’ve spent at least an hour drawing testing my wall on paper and practising my drawing skills. It seemed tedious at the time but now that I’ve got the wall done, I realize it was time well spent. It helped me realize that some of the flower types I wanted to paint wouldn’t work because I didn’t have the technical expertise to draw them. I wanted to put lavender flowers on the wall because I think they are very pretty, and the colour would look nice with my pastel theme but after trying to draw them on paper I realized they wouldn’t look as nice as I wanted them too. I drew two different test patterns but probably should have drawn a third. All the drawing was helping me build muscle memory which in term made the painting easier because my hands were already familiar with how to paint the shape of the flower.
Insert picture of sample drawings
3. Pick-up Materials
My suggested list of materials include:
· Paint
· Paint brushes
· Stir sticks
· Paint can opener
· Paint tray (unless you want to hold the paint cans which can get very heavy!) – I usually use empty butter or yogurt containers that I can throw out after I’m done instead of having to wash them
· Wet cloth or paper towel (to wipe oopsies)
· Pencil (optional)
· Tracing objects (optional)
· Sharpies or extra paint for detailing
4. It’s Go Time
You’ve found your inspiration; you’ve gathered your materials, so now it’s time to start painting! Here are a few things I’ve learned since I started my painting project.
Getting the first flowers on the wall helped me feel super accomplished and motivated me to keep going!
My Tips
Less is More- I bought quarts of each colour for this project. I got a discount through my painter but it was around $110 for paint (ouch!) and I have so much left over! I would encourage you to get test sizes or even go to the dollar store and pick up 4-5 bottles of the colour you like, and it would be less expensive, especially for colours you don’t need a lot of like the leaves and greenery on the wall.
Gong Show It!- It’s an expression we use to say a lot in my dance classes. All it means is just do it, don’t wait until you’re 100% ready and everything is perfect. I was so nervous about messing up the wall that I was very particular about drawing the flowers first to make sure everything looked nice, the spacing worked well and everything was proportional and circular. And it worked, it looked nice, but it was time consuming, and it caused some small complications. Because I’m not an expert painter I wasn’t able to cover all of the pencil lines completely. I erased some but if you look closely, especially on certain colours you can see my pencil lines which really annoys me. In some ways I’m glad I stenciled it, it made painting the wall easier since I just had to follow the guides but in others, I wish I had just free handed the whole thing. Which is why I’m saying the tracing objects are optional. If you’re looking for the ease and precision of stenciling the flowers on without the pencil lines, then you should do what my painter suggested in the first place and use a projector. I wish I had done that! I decided not to because I was impatient and didn’t want to perfect the design on paper, but I think it would have turned out a lot nicer. Maybe next time! Also, paint is super forgiving. If you mess up just wipe it off while it’s wet or paint over it after it dried, there’s no limit to the number of times you can start over with paint which makes it a great DIY project, especially for nervous beginner painters like me!
I stencilled and drew the whole wall before I started painting and I'm glad I did for some of it, my circles wouldn't look like circles if I hadn't drawn them on!
Go Little or Go Home- Use small paint brushes! I cannot stress this enough. Some of my flowers were very large so I thought using large paint brushes like you would use to edge a wall would work nicely. I picked up a few 2.5’s, a 2in and a 1.5in paint brush and thought I would be good. Wrong! It made the wall look so messy because I couldn’t control that many bristles as well (maybe if I got more expensive paint brushes, I wouldn’t have had the same issue?) and I couldn’t paint as precisely inside the lines as I wanted to which made it take longer and gave me more things to correct and paint over in the end.
What’s Mightier, the Paint or the Marker?- If you’ve read my weekly renovation updates you know I took a very long shopping trip to Michael’s to get paint markers to do the detailing on the wall. I thought it would be faster and look nicer than using paint and it would be more smudge proof than sharpies which I had also considered. Well, I bought them and tried them, but they are not any better than paint and a brush. I found it difficult to be consistent with them because the wall wasn’t 100% flat and you had to keep stopping to shake the paint down into the tip which made the lines very inconsistent. I think paint markers are designed to be used while drawing on a table where the tip is always down but that wasn’t the case for my project so after a few attempts I gave up and switched back to paint. The detail work looks a little inconsistent, some of the lines are definitely darker than others but I don’t mind how it looks and I think it will be more washable than sharpie still and I know my girls will somehow find a way to make a mess of the wall so being able to wipe it down without damaging the paint is really important to me.
I went through a lot of different things for the flower detail. The paint markers didn't work and neither did some of my detail attempts like this one. Too many little circles in the flowers and they looked too similar so I had to change the dark pink ones.
If You Don’t Know, Learn- Sounds harsh but it’s true and we live in a time where everything is available on YouTube! Art class was fun but never my strong suit, but I love roses! I think they are so pretty, same with sunflowers so I was determined to put roses on the flower wall. When it came time to paint the detail work for the roses, I gonged showed it. I held my phone in one hand while sandwiching the paint between my arm and chest with my paint brush in my painting hand and painted along with the video I was watching. I threw caution to the wind and figured if it looked bad, I could paint over it later, but I was actually incredibly amazed at how easy it was and how nicely the detail worked turned out. I’ll like the video here if you’d like to watch it before painting your own.
Hey Mom- Lastly, and I think most importantly, do not paint while your kids are around. I repeat, don’t do it! Physically remove your children from the house before you start a project like this, hop them up on sugar and send them to Grandma’s give the babysitter a little extra and send them out for a really long ice cream break, whatever you have to do make sure you’re not watching your kids while trying to do this! There were so many time where I would start painting and 5 minutes later Raiyah was crying because she didn’t want to be in the play plen or Thalia was tugging at me for snack #4015 that day and it was soooo distracting having to stop and start so much. It made the project take a lot longer than it should have and it was incredibly frustrating feeling like I was never getting anything done.
I was so impressed with how this turned out so far and I almost left it like this because I was worried the detail work would make it look less nice. I'm glad I pushed past my initial worries.
If you’re thinking about doing this yourself, you might be wondering how long it took me to complete the project. If you really want to do it you might not want to read further but if you’re curious here’s a rough breakdown. I had some technical difficulties while videoing, so I didn’t capture the whole process so some of this is a bit of guesswork since I lose track of time so easily, but the bottom line is that it took a loooooong time!
· Inspiration – 2 hours
· Practise – 2 hours
· Materials – 1 hour (I had to drive around to a few stores)
· Stenciling – 2 hours
· Painting – 8-9 hours (that’s for two coats plus detail work and then touch ups)
Don’t forget to take your before and after pictures or REELs if you’re a grammar. Maybe video yourself doing the whole thing like I tried (you can watch it here) because by the time you’ve gone this far you definitely want proof of the amazing work you’ve done! If you do decide to get creative and tackle a project like this, whether it’s flowers, rainbows, jungles or superheroes then please tag me because I’d love to see your creativity in action!
Ta-dah! I'm so happy with how it turned out! <3
Watch me paint the wall in super speed. I had a lot of fun painting but part of me wishes it was this fast!
