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Busy Muraling….

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…if that is a word. Not a lot of blog posts this week because I am focused on painting at a client’s house. So today’s post is a photo of what I worked on today. This corner is only about 20% of the mural….so stayed tuned for the rest in a few days.

Busy Muraling via lilblueboo.com

Everyone always assumes that my daughter must have the most amazing room since I paint so much nursery art. Nope. Her room is beige with a few Beatrix Potter wall hangings I put together and a couple of birdcages.
Busy Muraling Siennas room via lilblueboo.com
BUT….I’ve painted a lot of nurseries and the one I am working on now is definitely my favorite and I think it might inspire me to tackle Sienna’s room soon. What little girl wouldn’t want to sleep in a fairy forest?

Make a very large stencil or template….

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I’m working on a fairy forest mural for a client family right now that includes a very large butterfly chalkboard. It is going to be an awesome mural on five walls for the girls’ room so stay tuned for photos!

Make a very large stencil or template via lilblueboo.com
I want both sides of the chalkboard to be completely symmetrical so I made a large template that I will use for both sides of the butterfly shape. I placed it against our growth chart in the below photo so you can see that it is close to 5 feet tall!

Make a very large stencil or template 2 via lilblueboo.com
To make the large stencil/template:

1. First draw the shape you want and scan it into your computer.
2. Upload the shape to the Homokaasu program that you may have read about in my post How to Rasterize a Photo. With this program you can size the drawing to as large as you want and it will print off on letter sized paper in your printer.
3. Piece the shape together and tape all the seams with packing tape to reinforce it.
4. Outline the shape with marker and cut out.
Easy!

Journaling – Part IV – Accidental Pages

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Some of my favorite art journal pages were accidents that occurred over time. Below are just a few examples.

Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages via lilblueboo.comOur Lady of Guadalupe: I started sketching this picture out and didn’t like the direction it was going. I used some gel medium to make it glossy and it ended up smearing my initial drawing. So over a few weeks I just kept going back to it when I was on a plane or stuck in a motel room and just didn’t feel like writing. It was drawn in dots, hatch marks, lines and squiggles using color sharpie markers.

Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages 2 via lilblueboo.com
Cruel as the bitterness of life: This page was first a few collage layers that didn’t turn out right. I started covering it with crayon, sanding off layers and ended with a distressed paper/wax “mess” that looked aged with a few ghostly images peeking through. I started writing the words and the gel pen wouldn’t work and because the page was so thick I just ended up carving the words into the page. They didn’t show up on the background so I used some “white out” to fill the carving with. The words are from the movie Frida when Diego Rivera was describing her life’s work at the end: acid and tender, hard as steel, fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a smile, cruel as the bitterness of life. I messed up the quote.
Journaling - Part IV - Accidental Pages 3 via lilblueboo.com
Ganesh: This page resulted from a couple gel transfers gone awry.  I just kept painting over them with acrylic and doing another transfer until I got the last one right. There are also some layers of origami paper worked in as well.
Lesson learned: If you aren’t happy with your initial page, leave it and come back….maybe even several times! The more layers you add the more interesting the page becomes.
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