Playroom Sunshine

This is at my friend Emily’s house in a beautiful small town in Northern California surrounded by mountains.  This room is an upstairs loft playroom - her VERY cute son, Charlie, hung out with us the whole time we painted - hopefully he will have many fun times playing up there in the years to come. 

Emily wanted a simple, but bold, design with neutral colors. I drew this sunshine design on my iPad pro and used the Akaso Mini Projector to project it onto the wall.  It was during the day, so I closed one of the window blinds and was able to see the design enough to trace the outlines.  You can step back and make any changes on the evenness as you’re actually painting - and with this one I didn’t want it to be PERFECT - it looks much more childlike and hand done with some imperfections.   

I have a big stash of paint sample cards from Home Depot, so when I’m choosing colors I pretty much spread them all out on the floor and start creating different color combos. I LOVE how this one turned out. My roommate, Abby (Emily’s sister & Charlie’s aunt!), helped put together a palette for this one - she is great at matching up colors that I might not have chosen to go together. It’s always helpful to have another set of eyes and opinions!

At the paint store I bought a few more colors than I knew I was going to use - some a shade lighter and darker than the ones we had chosen. I ended up using a shade lighter on the outside ray because I thought the original color I had chosen just sort of overtook the whole design (as you can see in the timelapse video down below).  Easy enough to change - just painting over it!

I got a sample jar of each color from Home Depot (a few bucks for an 8 oz. jar) and had more than enough of each color. One 8 oz. jar of paint typically covers about 25 square feet. I did not use primer because all of these paints have primer included already - most paints do! All of them are Behr paints and I chose an eggshell finish for each one.

The final lineup was : Flowerpot, Airy Green, Chilly Blue, and Butter Rum.

The whole mural, from projecting the image to the last coat of paint, probably took about 8 hours (INCLUDING background paint, dry time, chasing an escaped cow, and actual mural painting :) 

Here it is in 60 seconds…