How to Paint Rainbow Stripes

2 Materials
$100
3 Days
Easy
See how easy it is to paint stripes on an accent wall! We did this over a long 3 day weekend and it wasn't hard at all.
We hadn't changed my daughters room since she was a newborn! I purchased her some bedding and fell in love with the colors on the bread spread! My daughter is creative and I didn't want to paint her room a solid color. I have always been in love with accent walls, especially when one wall of a room has stripes. I decided that I wanted to do a RAINBOW striped wall. When I first told my husband, he was skeptical… but, with a little frog tape and lots of color the rainbow wall was created! Read on to see more photos of my daughters room and how we got this rainbow wall to work!
First, I want to show you a BEFORE picture… because, the before pictures are always so fun to look back at! When I planned her room when I was pregnant, I purchased a polka dot crib bedding from Pottery Barn Kids. I painted these dots to match her polka dotted bedding and the entire room was painted a hideous pink… I never realized how a little (or a lot) of pink can go a LONG way. Whew. You’ll also notice there isn’t a lot of open floor space in her room… we moved her furniture around after we painted the room and she now has an open area in her room for playing.
Before you start painting, figure out the order you want the colors to go in. This is VERY important. At first I thought I wanted a rainbow pattern, but when we did this it left the pink and purple next to each other when we went to start the second set of stripes. The pink and purple stripes do not look good together! Then, I thought about doing a warm color and then a cool color… however, my husband didn’t like the green above the blue color in the second photo. He told me that blue is the sky and should always be above green the grass. So, we nitched these two ideas and went with what you see painted.


Then we primed her room. We had to prime it two times to get that pepto bismol pink color off her walls. Then, we painted the entire room white… we even painted the wall that we planned to paint the stripes on. Then, we took a break and let everything dry for a good 4 hours.
Next, you’ll want to figure out how many stripes you want on your wall. You will want to measure the height of your wall and most walls are 8′ high. Then, figure out the height of the frog tape (we got the thicker tape, so it was approx. 2″) and times it by how many white stripes you will have in-between the colors (we had 7). Then, take that number and subtract it from your wall height of 8′. Then, divide that number by how many stripes you want. You want the stripes to be around 10″ high. We did 10″ high stripes, but 6-8″ stripes work wonderfully if you aren’t doing a rainbow striped pattern. The 10″ stripes worked well for us, because the frog tape was 2″. So, my husband cut a 12″ board out of construction paper and lined the bottom with the 2″ frog tape. He used this board as a template to where he could mark the wall. It made the process SO easy! Then, we used our laser leveler (it sticks to the wall), so we could make marks on the wall all the way down. We used these marks to help us line up the frog tape for each stripe. Since we had already painted the entire wall white, we didn’t need to paint the white stripes that would be in-between the colors. It saved us a lot of tape and a headache! 


Here is the math behind it (not sure if this will help you):


Wall Height: 94” (8′)
 
Frog Tape: 1.88” (we rounded it to 2″) x 7 (white stripes) = 14”
94″-14” = 80″ divided by 8 (colored stripes) = 10”
Here is the wall after we finished it. Don’t forget to use FROG TAPE! It will leave you with nice crisp lines… we did have to touch up a little with a small paint brush and white paint, but it wasn’t bad at all!
I still have a lot of decorating to do in this room, but we moved her bed over so that it is against the wall now and not centered in the middle of the room. I also painted her furniture, it was from my childhood and needed to be refreshed. It was yellow and I painted it white and added pink knobs/hardware. If you want to see a complete tour of my daughter's finished room, click HERE. You can also find more details on how to paint the stripes HERE.
Suggested materials:
  • Frog Tape   (Lowes)
  • Paint   (Lowes)
Carrie @ Curly Crafty Mom
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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