The Fish Nursery Mural... Part 1

A month or two ago a good friend of mine asked if I'd paint a mural in her nursery. She and the father-to-be had picked fishing as the theme for the decor and she just found out she's having a boy.

Paint a room full of fish?! How could I say no??

She had a family member paint one wall of the nursery a rich shade of blue and that was to be the designated mural wall. Made my job pretty easy since all I had to do was fill it with feeesh! :)

When I arrived to start the project, I sketched out a few ideas for different styles of fish to get an idea of what she had in mind. I knew she wanted colorful fish, but was she going for exotic tropical style fish, or less-flamboyant local fish? She chose the latter, so no angel fish or parrotfish for this nursery. (Some of the fish would still be somewhat tropical looking though, due to their bright colors...)

I sketched out the fish on the wall in chalk and the two of us began to fill them in with white paint, to use as a primer. On a dark wall, a bright color like white or yellow or red requires lots of layers of paint, and the white underneath helps keep the color nice and bright looking.

She informed me that Daddy, being an avid fisherman in Southern Maryland, was adamant that there be at least one Rockfish included in the mural!

I drew him chasing after a school of little feeder fish. Poor baby feeder fish!! So cute! So tiny! So tasty!
Here's a close up of the feeder fish after they were filled in :)

 

These are two of the more tropical-looking fish. Having some colorful fish works well to balance out the more neutral fish like the Rockfish.

This picture shows 2 full days of progress on the mural. Not as far along as I had hoped, but doing many coats of paint over a dark wall takes a lot of time.

I added in another Rockfish (two's better than one, right?) and the great thing about them is that when you enter the nursery, they're totally the focal point of the room.

Daddy is happy :)  and I think Mommy is, too!

This weekend I'm heading back down to finish the mural and will post pics once it's complete!

Back Online, for real!

Got our interwebz hooked up today in VA and let me tell you.... it is slooowwww. Harrisburg had some nice DSL for sure. The one phone outlet in this house that works is in a weird place- some random little cubbie in the wall back in the pantry!? So we're getting a wireless modem and in the meantime I'm using our old one that works, sometimes, sitting by the edge of the pantry.

Heh.

Artsfest was this past weekend, and what a beautiful weekend it was! Such a gorgeous weekend to be outside and I gave my booth a makeover with some tropical looking blinds, but haven't yet found the cable to hook my phone up to the computer to show the pictures I took.

Still working on decorating the house. I'm realizing that in order to feel inspired in the office/studio, I'm going to have to make it aesthetically pleasing. There's just no way around it. I don't want that to mean "I have to go buy all new fancy stuff! PRETTY ROOOOOOOOMMM NOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!", I plan to make use of what I have and buy as little as possible. Partly because I am broke, but of course also to not be wasteful and keep things as eco-friendly as I can!

I have a lot of random furniture in there right now. The giant Epson is on a TV stand and my particle board desk that I've had since I was 11 is sort of falling apart, but maybe some screws or nails will hold it together for a while longer. I've got a lot of other random sized shelves all over the place too, for various printers/paper/art supplies.

So I'm looking for some inspiration. What can you show me? Do you have any favorite blogs where I can see some craft-room inspiration? Or maybe there's a photo-set on Flickr that I have yet to find? Do you have a link to your own craft room you can show me? Leave a comment.... I'd love to see and get some ideas :)

Paint Samples

Blogging at 1:00am left me too tired to include color samples in the last post... what a cop-out! This is an ART blog, I can't get away with that!!

You want PICTURES and you want to see COLOR!!!
I aim to please :)

I played around online with Behr's painty-tool-thing. On the Behr website, you can enter in a specific color name and then play with pictures of rooms, put it on the walls, etc. Of course computer monitor colors vary, so they may not be 100% accurate, but you get the idea!  I couldn't color the furniture in the photos, so you'll have to use your imagination until I can post real pictures of the actual rooms... but at least this is something, right?

Here's the Master Bedroom in Honey Moth: (I love that name, don't you?!) 

The color of the nightstand in this photo is the color of our wood floors. Our bedding is the greenish color in the upper left color palette and our furniture is close to the dark brown in the upper left color palette. Our trim is white like in this photo.

This is the guest room in Light Mint:

Yeah, I know, same photo... hehe. Behr's site didn't have a whole lot from which to choose!
We decorated this room with maps, hence the color palette that I chose. The trim is white,  and we've got a big framed map with pins in it of the places we've been. Right now it's only North America, but maybe next year that will change and we can get a world map. We've also got a globe and some other fun map-y travelly stuff.

Here is the office in Honeydew: (in person this color is much brighter!)

Pretend it's not a kitchen. I didn't see any office sample photos that would resemble mine, this was the closest I saw! It will have darker green (that color is called CATERPILLAR!) and bright blue accents..... maybe... hopefully.
...Ideally!

Here is (sort of) the dining room in Cheerful Hue: (I think that was my husband's favorite color name!)

In the color palette, the tan is the color of our couches (the dining room is big enough for a table and chairs on one side and then couches/a TV at the other end). In the color palette, the green looks about right for our table and chairs, but in the actual picture it is showing way too bright! It's really a dark-green-stained wood table and chairs. The red is a terra-cotta tiled floor, closest I could do in this photo.

And here's an idea of the dark teal that's in most of the house that we love:

Like the others, the colors in the palette are more accurate than those of the room. The walls are a little darker than this, the wood is a very dark cherry. The furniture will be dark brown, and there will be lots of green plants :)

So there you have it! Some idea of colors. I'll be haunting your home-improvement blogs in the next few weeks to get lots of ideas... I'll be sure to keep things updated.

And now off to get ready for ARTSFEST!!!
http://www.annmariegarden.org/

Hope to see you there :)

Iiiiiii've been PAINTING!!!

BUT not art. I've been painting our new house! I got to go pick out colors last week and let me tell you... after we closed on the house last Thursday evening, before going to sleep that night, my husband said to me, "Why don't you go to Home Depot tomorrow and pick out some colors of paint that you like?"
Do you really think a girl like me could sleep after a comment like that!? NOOOOOO!!! I felt like a tiny child on Christmas Eve.
Tomorrow I'M GOING TO GO PICK OUT PAAAAAAAAINT!!! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

And so it began. The busy-ness and sleepless nights.

Of course I didn't sleep. I got up the next morning all giddy and stopped at a Home Goods for the helluvit, found some ridiculously cute and colorful cannisters for our boring white kitchen, then grabbed a coffee and headed to THE DEPOT!

Our main room is a dark teal and so is the hallway, so pretty much every color I picked was going to not have to clash with it since it's everywhere. I ended up picking out all pastels since the rooms are small and I wanted to brighten them up. I picked out 10-15 swatches, hung various ones in different rooms, and when my husband came home we finalized our selections. I picked out a limey-green for the office/art studio. That's the only room I wanted to make nice and bright :) My friends and family were shocked at my color choices... since my art is SO bright, they expected bright colors. The office will be bright, but it's still a very light limey green. My husband found it hard to believe that wouldn't look terrible with the teal, since the office will be at the end of the hall and the first thing you see back there when you look up the stairs. But I assured him that lime and teal totally go together (and almost picked those as our wedding colors since he loves green) and after I held up the swatch next to the white trim and teal wall, he was a believer!

So what did I pick? These are all Behr paints, but it's late and I'm too lazy to go find pictures/swatches online and post them.
Master: Honey Moth
Office/Art Room (what my husband has now deemed "The Bug Room"): Honeydew
Guestroom: Light Mint (it looks more blue than green though)
Dining area: Cheerful Hue (a light yellow).

The guestroom and master bedroom are done (after me, my mom, AND my husband all pulled an all-nighter on Monday night- we were just TOO FULL of paint-induced-energy!!! Maybe Behr adds caffiene into their paint?!), and I took some before pics. Once we get things unpacked and set up, I'll post them along with the after pictures :)