The Making of the Mural

Over the past several weeks, we have been in high nesting mode around here.  Our house is pretty much undergoing a major overhaul.  In addition to watching lots and lots of college basketball, we have been deep cleaning everything, furniture rearranging, baby furniture assembly, major re-organization of just about everything (drawers, closets, shelves, cupboards etc), yard work on a huge scale, re-wiring some electrical stuff, re-constructing shelves, painting, carpet cleaning, you name it and we are probably trying to get it finished here at the house before baby arrives!  It almost feels like every time we cross something off our list, there are two more things that get added on, but it also feels really good to be making so much progress on our little home and we are looking forward to enjoying the fruits of our labor.

One of our favorite accomplishments of the past couple of months has by far been the development, design and completion of the mural for Baby Girl's room.  We both agreed on what we wanted to do, and so I comissioned Joe to develop and design a beautiful mural for her wall(s).  We then painted it together.  Even though I didn't allow Joe to snap my photo, I was beside him helping him paint and keeping him company while he painted when I needed to take a break.

We are so excited about how it turned out that we could not wait until the big nursery reveal on the blog to show you all!  So this post is all about how it was done. As of today, her room is probably 75% done, so we will be posting more photos when it is completely finished and we will do a big reveal. 

A couple of disclaimers before I post these photos- 1) We are SO grateful for our pal Natalie's generosity in letting us borrow her overhead projector for going on several weeks now.  It was invaluable in completing this project and we could not have done this without her generosity or the magic of an old-school overhead projector!!!  Secondly, for my own feelings of embarassment, the baby's room was very obviously not picked up or "staged" in any way for these blog photos while we were painting...  I'm just saying.  So, that being said....here we go!

Our idea was to have a beautiful, lush cherry tree blowing blossoms in the wind around her room and over her crib.  Joe then set about tapping into his creative skills and designed a beautiful, one-of-a-kind tree of blossoms for our little gal...

Here he is working away on the design.  To start with, Joe studied the shapes and forms of many different kinds of trees and then combined the elements he liked into our tree...

After he sketched out the tree onto paper, he traced it onto a transparency which we then projected onto the wall using the projector.  This then allowed us to size it to the wall correctly and we then spent time tracing the outline of it using chalk.

you can see what it looked like afterwards...

We then began painting it in.  We used sample size paint from Home Depot from their Disney collection for all of the paint for the mural.  At around $3 a sample, it was hard to beat!

....the completed tree....

Joe then set to work on designing and developing different shapes and sizes of blossoms for the tree and wind to be blowing around.  He did some research on this as well and then again sketched them out onto paper (as seen here).

...and here....

He then again traced his drawings onto a transparency sheet like so....

 

....and then we projected them onto the tree and traced them with chalk onto the wall...

...it looked like this when we were finished tracing on one wall....

All that was left to do was to paint them!  We used a hot pink color as well as a bubble gum pink color for our blossoms (Also from Home Depot's Disney's collection- in sample sizes).  (The light from the overhead was very handy and helped us to see when we were painting in the evenings....)

The painting part took us an entire week of evenings and weekend days to complete.  Since the color of our walls was somewhat "dark" (its a beige color even though it may not look like it in these photos!) each blossom had to be painted two and sometimes three times each to completely be filled in! We were not expecting this- but it worked out fine....just took us a little bit longer than expected.

But we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE how it came out!

Baby Girl's crib is going to go right there in that corner...under all of those pretty blossoms....

 

 

The window in the photo above is the window shown in the picture above this one- so you can see how the blossoms continue to blow across the wall...

Here is a shot showing the other angle looking towards the tree....

Needless to say, we love how it turned out.  It was truly a labor of love to get it all completed the way we wanted, but it was something we had an absolute blast working on and completing together.