Cabin in the Woods
Luckily my parents were up for the idea of letting me paint this in our family cabin in Drummond, WI. This is in a downstairs bedroom and fits the area well, as they are surrounded by lakes, woods, and the North Country Trail. I spent about 12 days in WI over Christmas, and worked on this at different times throughout my whole trip. The fam would join me downstairs for some brews, conversation, and hangin’ out as I painted. <3
I follow an account on instagram called Camp Wandawega - a couple (David and Tereasa) in Elkhorn, WI restored a historical resort that is now used as a retreat for a slew of companies, musicians, artists, and brands. They posted a while ago a picture of their daughter’s nursery that Tereasa painted from a vintage paint by numbers print. I thought it was GORGEOUS and it inspired me to do one of my own.
There are so many beautiful vintage paint by number designs you can find - I chose this design as I thought it fit the location really well. I had a digital download of the design, and played around with it a little bit to fit the dimensions of the wall I was going to paint. I used the Akaso Mini Projector to project the design onto the wall. You don’t need the projector to be PERFECT - just visible enough to get your guidelines. Since there are SO many parts to this painting, I missed a lot of them, but it’s easy enough to take a look at the design and pencil in the parts that you missed - all of the shapes have pretty jagged edges which is nice ;) With a design this involved, I found it REALLY helpful to use a projector to transfer.
I have a big stash of paint sample cards from Home Depot, so when I’m choosing colors I spread them all out on the floor and start creating different color combos. I ended up with over 20 colors for this one! Lots of colors, but each section is pretty small - I got a sample size of each color from Home Depot (a few bucks for an 8 oz. jar) and had more than enough of each color. A few of the colors looked great with just one coat, but there were a handful that needed a second coat - sometimes makes a HUGE difference! One 8 oz. jar of paint typically covers about 25 square feet. All of them are interior Behr paints and I chose an eggshell finish for each one.
I didn’t prime or paint the wall ahead of time (most paints now already have primer in them!) I just left the wall the light green color that it was, since every inch of the wall would be colored in new paint anyways!
After I had traced the whole design with pencil, I used pencil to write the color in each little part of the design (not all at once - just the section that I was working on). Since this design had sooooo many parts, this was pretty necessary to keep track of what went where!
Tyler Childers, Monica and Jess Love Boys, and Morbid kept me entertained, while some New Glarus (my faaaavorite beer - only sold in Wisconsin) kept me hydrated!