Too Poor for Wallpaper and Too Slapdash for Stencils

My entrance hall needed something special but because I have slightly peculiar taste, finding an off-the-shelf stencil or budget wallpaper was going to be hard. Luckily the wall had been painted the week before as part of renovations that we were doing.

I drew out my design directly onto the wall free- hand using a soft pencil and eraser. The trick with this type of design is to repeat some elements all over and to choose particlular shapes and lines and to stick to them. Unfortunately the pics aren’t very clear.

Notice there are too many confusing lines. I cleaned up my sketch using an eraser.

The next day, with fresh eyes, I saw that especially my horizontal lines were very skew, always a risk if you are standing so close to a big canvas when drawing. You have to step away from it. The fix was to use a ruler or T-square to go over everything. Having straight lines also makes it easier to mask.

The next job was to mask as far as possible. This can be a big job because the sligtest mistake would be seen. A paint scraper is useful in ensuring that the masking tape doesn’t tear in the wrong place where you tear it off. Also, its important to remember what is part of the design and what is negative space, otherwise you paint the wrong thing. The outlines of the curves were painted freehand with a large artists brush.After that, I gave the design a couple of coats of water-based paint that matched the base coat.

Of course this type of style may not be to everyones taste but I am very happy with my mid century abstract mural.