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?

A promising start

I got over my fear of messing up our freshly painted walls and finally got started. The semi-gloss has other ideas, however, and is proving its effectiveness. It would seem that it's so resistant to marking that it is nearly impossible to paint over top of it. But I'm stubborn and wouldn't let a little thing like that stop me. I used the brown right out of the can and just slapped it on for coat number one. Without any other tones, it looked so flat. The green was still visible through the brown and the brush strokes were there (a symptom of painting onto the glossy wall). On the other hand, it was easy to wipe away mistakes quickly.

An hour of watching paint dry (actually, of watching TV downstairs) and I was back up for a second coat. This time, I mixed the brown with beiges and grays, to give it more depth. The second coat also created much better coverage. I'm not sure if this picture captures the difference between using one color versus several - the top branch and trunk already got the layered treatment, but the bottom branch has not - it looks much more boring and 2-dimensional.

I decided to hold off on getting on a ladder to do the green foliage, since I was home along, so I turned next to Mr. Parrot. I had to do the same double coat, slapping on the primary colors once for coverage (and, since I had bits of white and gray on Ms. Giraffe on the right, you'll see I put down the first layer of her eye and tongue, making for a rather ghostly scene).

Another hour or so and then it was time for some textured feathers. You can see that I added in some orange, tinted some with white, added red to the blue and vice versa. Nothing particularly crazy, no shadowing or realistic texture, but I think it's a good compromise for a cartoonish look.

I was wrapping up the parrot when D came home to admire my work. He also suggested something incredibly obvious and yet so ingenious - if one coat wasn't adhering to the paint, why not prime first? And so I present to you my primed giraffe. That was where I called it quits for the day, so I don't know if it will help. But after seeing how poorly the yellow, more than any other color, covered up the green, even two yellow coats after priming will be better than what I would have faced without the white background.

(Don't look too closely at the fabric in the window - that's for the next post. I know, I know - "don't look" is a surefire way to make you look, even if you didn't look at it the first time.)