The house we live in does not have a formal dining room. This means that generations of previous owners have tried to turn various rooms into a dining room. At some point an owner thought it would be a good idea to paint the guest bedroom in dark colors complete with a chair rail and texturing. This picture shows how it looked after we'd removed the chair rail and sanded the texture. With our baby girl due in April, we decided it was time for a change.
After I stopped teaching at the end of the semester to go on maternity leave, my mother came out to help paint the nursery a more suitable color. My husband and I weren't about to let the fact that we were having a girl keep us from painting the room a nice sky blue.
We painted one of the walls with magnetic receptive primer. This way when the kiddo gets a bit bigger we have a whole wall on which to hang art work and homemade magnets. Sadly, it isn't super strong so we can't have the world's best marble track. After the primer, this wall got was painted tree green (like in the accents below.) Magnetic primer is really dark, so the blue would have been a different shade on that wall.
I wanted a little decoration for the walls, so I designed a giant tree with curly branches. However, it didn't end up fitting well anywhere in the room. So instead we will have several smaller branches coming out of windows and door frames. This is the start of the first one.
Mafe Maria's page on creating a mural was really helpful in breaking down the process. I really wanted to have the walls be the same terrific shade of yellow, but alas, we already had a shade of yellow in the hallway and it just didn't work.
Here is the tree branch with the brown filled in. In another project I am going to cut leaves out of mat board to paint. We will then stick them to the wall with sticky tack. This way the leaves can move around and we can even have them change colors and fall off in the fall. More on that later, along with the updated branches.
