From pumpkin to carriage - part 4: The Dr. Seuss mural is done (and other miscellaneous stuff)

Tada!

I'll give you time to gasp, have your jaw drop in appreciation and then stand up to give us the ovation we deserve. I am all out of proportion thrilled with how this wall turned out. It is officially the new happiest place in our home. 

Ok, on to logistics. I used Liquitex Acrylic paint mixed with Liquitex Matte Medium (1:1). The medium reduces glare and reduces the appearance of brush strokes. THO helped with mixing colors (The Yep was a pain to get right), he has a good eye for that. I painted the figures, then set up the projector again and went over the outlines one more time with the Black Sharpie Brush Tip. All the shading is also done with the same sharpie. Oh, and I don't think you can tell from the picture but not everything in that mural is painted on to the wall. The balloon is actually made of foam sheet. I projected on to pink and yellow foam sheet to get the outline and the shading done, then cut out the pieces from the sheet. THO stuck them in place with command strips.

THO has assembled the crib, the crib mattress has arrived (no sheets yet though). THO also put in the closet organization system and is working on hanging bookshelves as I type. We're close to the finish line (and one month away from the official baby arrival date). Part 5 will have it all, I promise.

From pumpkin to carriage - part three: the mural comes to life

I stood in fear before the canvas. I looked down at my hands and my many, many thumbs looked back at me. I swear they were smirking. A couple looked at me with pity. My throat was dry. When I picked up the sharpie, I noticed a distinct tremor in my hands. How did I get myself into this gut filled with butterflies (or, perhaps, based on the size of them, pterodactyls) situation? Perhaps we should back up a bit and tell the story from the beginning.

With the painting and carpeting all done, I was raring to work on the next step in the transformation of ugly to nursery but THO was doing his best wet blanket impersonation. He wouldn't let me in the nursery for more than about 40 seconds at a time because of the smell of the paint. While 40 seconds is about enough to let out a few appreciative oohs and aahs, and rub your toes in the plush new carpet, it is not, I assure you, enough time to work on a mural. We had the window open and I just had to do what I did worst, wait.

We had decided that the we were going to do a Dr. Seuss mural. I love the good old doctor. I grew up with his books. Marvin K. Mooney and Wocket in my Pocket are my two favourites. I can still recite pages. I love how his words wriggle into your brain, and roll off your tongue and how his awesome art makes it impossible not to smile. THO has been reading Dr. Seuss to She-Who-Is-Coming for a while now - he scoots down to tummy level at bedtime and reads her a story. She, in return, punches me in the gut or ribs. Good times are had by all. I sat myself down, surrounded by our collection of Seuss books and picked out images for the mural. We planned for a mural that covers half a wall in the nursery - the lower half is chalkboard paint. I made a rough sketch on a piece of a paper (no grid, nothing too fancy) of where each image would go. The characters that made the final cut are The Yep on the Step, the boy and the balloon from Oh the Places You'll Go, the Blue Fish, a pair of Sneetches, the Lorax and a Truffula tree.

The plan was to project the images on to the wall and trace them. Basically, to cheat. We own a Cinemin projector. I dug that out of storage and that is when we hit hurdle one. The Cinemin is able to project from an iPhone or iPod (not from a laptop). The problem though is that the Cinemin connects to the iPhone 4, not to the latest and greatest iPhone 5s (which is what THO and I both currently own) and which, of course, in true Apple fashion has a completely different connector.  Undaunted, I went spelunking in our box of electronics past and found an old iPhone. I also managed to scare up a power cable for it, and soon enough we had the projector up and running, only to discover that the image it projected was so dim that I would only be able to work on the mural in the dead of the night and that the image was too pixelated to actually work as a stencil. Aaaaaargh. I ran around in panic (cue headless chicken impersonation) for a bit, bemoaned the fact that all our mural related dreams were dead as proverbial doorknobs and beat my chest in despair that our nursery would forever more be the ugliest in the world. Having got the histrionics out of the way we sent out an SOS email to friends and acquaintances and a couple of days later were in possession of a full size, I-mean-business-turn-on-my-bulb-instead-of-the-heat projector that made an image bright enough to see at noon with the blinds open. We had a few teething problems with this projector too - we didn't have the ability to connect it to our macbooks, we had to scare up an old laptop that hadn't been booted in three years, had driver problems with the Windows installation, had to boot up the Ubuntu installation instead (and this one hadn't been run for 6 years) - but finally, finally we had the first image projected - the Sneetches were on the wall.

Cut back to me plus sharpie plus pterodactyls plus surplus thumbs. What if I ruined the wall? What if I did the eyes wrong and all the images turned out just a tad creepy? THO gently pointed out that our worst case scenario was having to repaint half a wall and hang up Dr. Seuss pictures from a calender instead of having a mural. With this sensible back up plan I calmed down and stepped up to the wall quivering with new found confidence. I had a blast. It was really easy to trace out the images. I loved watching them come to life one after another. The eyes and faces and a few other small details took a bit of work because the images in some cases were not as high resolution as we would have liked and I had to use the book as a reference when the tracing got a bit fuzzy. THO did some basic image editing as well. He worked on the Boy with the Balloon  - we needed a slightly larger boy but not a larger balloon. THO also edited blue fish a bit - there was something about the fish's eyelashes that THO was convinced made the fish look a bit, well, mean, when viewed from certain angles, so he edited the eyelashes to his satisfaction.

Here it is in all it's glory and it makes me smile every time I walk into the room:

From pumpkin to carriage - part two: the canvas is prepared

The problem with grand plans is that a certain amount of back breaking effort is required to convert them to reality. It took THO and I a while to muster up the enthusiasm for said effort.

Step one was painting the walls - we wanted to get this out of the way before we put down new carpeting. I decided that I wanted the walls to be white. And I wanted one accent wall. THO toodled off to Home Depot and came back with eighty nine white sample cards from the Behr range of paints. Did I want Moon Rise? Was Vermont Cream a better bet? What were my feelings about Cotton Fluff? Was Polar Bear what I secretly desired, or perhaps Snowy Pine had caught my eye? I (pretty much at random) pointed at three of the whites. THO brought home three little sample paints and put up swathes on the wall to help us choose. We ended up picking the boringly named Creamy White. Next up, the accent wall. I started off wanting this to be green. THO dutifully picked out green samples, we pored over them together, selected our favourites and got the samples up on the wall. The colours looked like mold, phlegm and three day old cow cud to me. I went off greens and decided that yellow would be so much prettier. Rinse and repeat. I hated every yellow we tried out with a passion. THO, with patience worthy of sainthood, did not blink an eye when I declared that purple was the way to go. He is a better person that I. Luckily, I really liked the purple (called Wildflower) and we did not have to test the strength of our union any further.

The next task was the one we both dreaded the most - taping. Taping sucks. Until you start taping you forget what a mind numbing painful awful task it is and how you swore on everything holy the last time you did it that you would never, ever under any circumstances ever do it again. And the room will always surprise you with how many little things there are to tape that you did not previously consider. Once we were all taped, THO donned his Dexter outfit (a white plastic full body painting suit) and went on a painting binge. Over a weekend and a couple of weeknights he worked on two coats on 3 white walls (and the inside of our Harry Potter closet), two coats of purple on our accent wall, and finally, one half wall of chalkboard paint. The dog and I kept trying to sneak into the room and both of us were repeatedly chased away. When he was all done though, I was thrilled. The room no longer closely resembled a dingy dungeon. Paint is a magical thing.

A couple of weeks later our carpet shipment arrived and the transformation was complete. The dog adores the new carpet, as you can see

Here is the 'before' again aka the dingy dungeon of depression:

And here is the after:

Our canvas is ready. Next stop, the mural.