Happy Little Clouds

You'll have to bear with me as I continue to go on and on about the nursery. We actually have some fun yard pictures to share too, but I'm on a roll here and excited to show you all our progress.

First an update on the Curtain Poll - if you haven't voted yet, please do. I have to admit I went into the whole thing almost sure of which fabric I liked best. And it isn't the fabric you like best. And while I reserve the right to choose mine over yours, your convincing arguments are changing my mind (for the record, I like the blue and green elephants, so it was still a popular choice). I think the simpler design of the yellow stripes might be the way to go.

Next onto the good stuff. My cloud dream has come true! After a few hours dragging the ladder around the room and dabbing on paint, I have a pretty sky ceiling.  I read a lot of how-to guides on the internet and it turns out there are about as many "how to paint cloud" websites and strategies as there are clouds. There is no standard set of colors, tools, or techniques. So I picked a few ideas I liked and got to work.

Step one, for me, was mixing white and the blue ceiling paint to make a subtle base layer. I put this on gently and sparingly with a large, very dry brush. It was so pale that I thought it would be helpful to mark the clouds with painters tape, but the tape kept falling down anyway, so I gave up on that strategy. Right away, I ran into the small problem of deciding which way to orient the clouds (most clouds in the sky are at last in part parallel with the horizon, but of course I had no horizon). I decided to have them all sort of face different directions, with a vague orientation towards the sun lamp in the middle of the room.

 After step one, this was the very subtle result. I let that dry for a little while.

An hour or so later, I was dabbing on pure white paint with a sponge, for the highlights (i.e. where the sun would hit the cloud). I think the fact that the ceiling is a flat paint and the white is a semi-gloss also helped the clouds stand out. I didn't take a picture of this step but basically it made it a lot easier to see the clouds and gave them some depth.

That took a little a little extra time to dry, since it was a little thicker than the first layer (but still not "three-dimensional" - I tried to apply very little paint so that there was no actual texture that would one day complicate an attempt to repaint the ceiling white).

Finally, the third layer was a little bit of gray mixed with white (I actually used Sherwin William's Knitting Needles, our living room paint, that has slightly warm undertones). I dabbed this below the white highlight areas for shadows.

Here's the final results, taken with D's much better camera and much better skill than the two pictures above:

Love love love it! The ceiling isn't as blue as I would have liked (this picture actually makes it look more vibrant than it is) but the whole effect is probably much better this way - much more subtle. Now that it's done, I find myself staring at my own bedroom ceiling thinking how boring it looks....maybe time to add a few happy little clouds?