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I don't know about you, but I am so ready to begin a new year! Thank you to everyone who has supported me this year in business and life in general! I'll be back with more decorative painting projects in 2011. My studio is all cleaned and my brushes, trowels and stencils are ready to leave their mark on some unsuspecting surfaces. ;-)
Have a happy and safe New Year's Eve!
The last room I will feature here from the Cambridge House Project is actually the first room I started with here. A big, lazy willow tree spans two walls, giving little baby Ezra something fun to look at while lying in her crib. This first picture shows the work in progress. You can see my rough sketches taped to the wall. The trunk of the tree starts out with the deepest color orange and gradually fades to a lighter orange as the leaves and branches spread to the second wall.
With the crib in place, so can see the effect.
Did you catch Ezra name "hidden" in the branches?
Across the room, on a slanted ceiling, another branch with a butterfly, bird and dragonfly greet you as you enter this room. The same simple color palette was used.
Again, I used a variety of more abstract reference materials, adapting them to fit the space and overall design concept.
Well, I hope you have enjoyed seeing all the fun painting I was allowed to do at the Cambridge House Project!
Continuing on with the Cambridge House Project, today I will feature Rafi's Room. After much debate, a transportation theme was selected. I used a variety of reference materials that featured more abstract cars, trucks, etc. and kept the color palette limited to blues, greens and oranges.
This was a fun room to do and because the designs are loose, they were easy to freehand.
I also needed to incorporate Rafi's name in this room, so I found a font called "ciclo" that looks life a chain link for a bicycle. If you click on the photo to enlarge, you will see some of my notes scrawled on this paper. It was decided to do the letters in all upper case, in two shades of blue, with each letter being approximately 15" tall.
I created a "link" stencil using some left over RocLon Multi-purpose cloth. I have found that this fabric works well for stencils and it is a good way to use up the left over scraps. For the centers of the "links" or the holes, I used a circle punch and cut out as many as I needed using some masking film.
The finished project turned out cute!
Birch Trees on walls has been very big this year. We have seen it done with various expensive wallpapers and wall decals. They are quick and easy to freehand or stencil and can be customized to fit a particular space.
Last year I experimented with some Birch Trees on a wall in my living room. I love bringing a little piece of the outdoors, right inside my house!
I did these Birch Trees in a very small Powder Room as part of the Cambridge House Project (see yesterday's post). I drew the trees on two opposing walls, with a brown watercolor pencil. I then used a brown water based paint and liner brush to execute the trees. Some trees were done in a lighter brown, thinning the paint more with water, to achieve some depth. This is a very, very small room. You are seeing the entire width of the room here, maybe 4' wide.
A closer look. Because it is such tight quarters in this room, it was very hard to get a good shot!
This is the opposite wall. It looks unfinished in the center because a long mirror will be mounted here, the width of the sink. The only wall space that will be seen once the mirror is mounted, will be to the left and right of the sink, floor to ceiling. The base of the mirror will come about 1" above the owls head.
A few days after I completed this project, I got a call from my good friend and fellow decorative painter, Chris Smith, telling me she had a Birch Tree project to do for a client of hers. Here is her beautiful interpretation!
If you are not inclined to freehand some trees, Helen Morris over at the Stencil Library has a wonderful Bare Trees stencil design that can be custom ordered to the size you need.
I hope you are all enjoying a little downtime between Christmas and New Year's Day, relaxing, spending time with family, etc. My time with family was cut short by a day due to the Blizzard of 2010 that began here in the Boston area yesterday. The family members who were traveling, wisely decided to get on the road a day earlier to avoid the brunt of the storm. By noon today, we had 18" of snow here. It's really very pretty.
Here is a view from my living room window, looking out onto my front porch. Now I have real snowflakes, as well as my stenciled snowflakes on my window!
Over the last two weeks, I've been very fortunate to have a job going on within walking distance from my house. The homeowners are a delight to work with, and each project I've worked on has been nothing but fun! What a great way to end 2010. Over the next few days, I will share each of the 4 projects I worked on in this house.
Today I will start with my final project completed here... the stairs. When I first saw this incredible staircase designed by Melanie Royal and executed by her team for Peacock Pavillion, I knew I had to do something like this for a client soon! The home I am working in is an older, typical Cambridge, MA house, that has been converted into two units, 3 floors and a basement. My clients have a young family and wanted a contemporary look to this older house, so they were very instrumental in picking out designs with me, for each of the projects. The majority of the walls in this home are freshly painted with a bright white. When I first introduced this stair riser idea, I was thinking it would be done in black and white. When the homeowners decided to do them in a color, I was thrilled! I did samples in a Tomato Red and three different shades of yellow. The bright yellow samples won out.
The photos really do not give you the fabulous impact that these designs make as you enter the house and are greeted with this cheery collection of patterns. I used four stencil designs from Royal Designs Moroccan collection: Curved Connection, Eastern Lattice Small, Moorish Fleur de Lis, and Endless Moorish Circle. By the way, there are actually 2 identical sets of stairs, so I did repeat the same patterns. This is the set of stairs from the first to the second floor. There is a hallway at the top and a set of stairs from the second to the third floor, so this dramatic effect carries right up through the house.
A closer look.
Here you can see each of the four stencil designs used.
More projects in this house tomorrow. I wish I had stairs in my house!
1/10/2011: Additional notation for this post.
I am very pleased and honored to announce that Melanie Royal did a very nice write up about my stair project on her blog, Designamour. You can read her post here.
Yes, I am very behind on my posts here, but the good news is, I've been very, very busy! I just finished doing three local craft shows with my PetMats and am happy to report that they were well received. Of course, as soon as I got that venture off the ground, I got three new wall jobs. The wall work is now consuming all of the my time, so I will not be able to add any new PetMat designs or get my KidMat designs out until early in the new year. I am excited about the mats and want to be sure I can devout the time needed to these.
More about the new wall work jobs in upcoming posts.
I did take a few minutes to start getting my house ready for the holidays. Using one of my favorite stencils from Royal Design Studios, Kimono OverAll, I stenciled my windows with Glass Wax. Remember Glass Wax? It's hard to find, but I did find some at my local Ben Franklin's. Melanie is running a web special for snowflake stencils at the moment. I did place an order earlier this week for some Moroccan stencils, so will be receiving my new, free, snowflake stencils shortly! I used the Kimono OverAll stencil for the Holiday Cat PetMat above.
Next, I tackled my chalkboard backsplash. For this, I just cut out a template, traced and colored in.
While I was doing all of this, I made myself a latte, adding a snowflake design with the Stencil Library's snowflake pattern. :-) They have some great Holiday stencils on this site, so be sure to pop over there for a look!
I also trotted out my favorite little Grinch for Holidays!
