Painting the Nursery: A Time Lapse of the Baby's Room

A start-to-finish, time-lapse perspective of our painting technique for the baby's nursery room. We decided on a magical forested mountain design, accompanied by six homemade hot air balloons and their tiny, plush passengers. The mountains consist of five separate "ranges" against a muted yellow sky. Each mountain range is designated by one of five shades of blue/green that gradually lighten as the mountain ranges grow farther from the viewer, giving the illusion of haze enveloping the more distant landscapes.

We started by painting all the walls yellow. From the blank yellow walls we then created a grid of 12"x"12 squares using masking tape.

On the computer, I created a replica of each wall using Photoshop and created a similar grid on the digital view as I did on the actual wall. I then added the mountain designs into the Photoshop image and printed out a mock-up design of each wall.

Next, we looked at the printed Photoshop design and copied each square of the grid onto the walls of the nursery. We went square by square until we had a light pencil sketch of the mountains on the walls. Once that was done we removed the masking tape from the walls.

We got several different buckets at the hardware store and mixed the yellow from the sky with the darkest blue of the mountains to get the color ranges for all the mountains in between. The only exception were the two furthest (lightest colored) mountains. For those two ranges we had to add some plain white paint we had left over from the ceiling in order to lighten the blue-yellow paint mixture enough to give contrast between the two lightest mountain ranges. Without the white paint, it didn't matter how much yellow we added to the blue paint; the mixture was still just too dark. Once we were happy with the shades of colors in the buckets, it was time to get painting!

We started with the darkest blue mountains first and painted the bottom part of the walls. Next we started with the lightest mountain range (the farthest mountains in the distance) towards the top of the wall. After that we painted the second lightest mountain range. Then the third, and finally the fourth lightest layer.

The trees were created using stamps. We cut out tree trunks with branches on thin layers of foam and then glue that foam to cardboard to create the stamp. The cardboard gave us something to hold on to (we created little cardboard handles) and the foam branches are what we dipped in a tray of paint and then stamped on the wall. We created five different tree stamps of different heights and widths to add variety to our landscape.

Before the paint dried on our bare tree branches from the stamps, we took a fine-tipped paint brush and added the pine needles to the branches.

We didn't want to paint the fourth wall, so the wall with the closet ends in a cliff. At the edge of the cliff is some sort of bonsai tree that we created by tracing a shape that I printed out on the computer and then hand painted.

The hot air balloons are painted paper lanterns, which were then adorned with baskets, a fishing next over the top hemisphere of the balloon, twine, and little handmade sandbags.

Music:
"Dream Pipe" by DarkeSword (Shariq Ansari)
A remix of the "Special Stage" theme from Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Originally composed by Masato Nakamura
Remix courtesy of Overclocked Remix at http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01129