GraceLinBlog: sky ceiling, step 1

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

sky ceiling, step 1

We're still living in two places but that hasn't stopped us from starting our own personalization in our new house. My pet project is getting Rain Dragon's room ready. I have big plans for it. At first I though I would paint a mural in it like I did for L& R but the view outside Rain Dragon's future window changed my mind:

and I decided on an elaborate sky ceiling instead. First, I needed to paint a daytime sky with soft puffy clouds which meant blue paint on the ceiling:

Rain Dragon watched me with great interest and confusion the whole time. Since she was going to be witness to all my painting I used low voc paint which is pretty amazing-- it really is odorless!--but gave me a bit of shell-shock at the cash register. So I tried to use it sparingly. The color is Benjamin Moore Barely Teal, which is a very light greenish blue instead of the typical sky blue because I wanted more of a fairy tale sky.

But I still wanted the clouds to be realistic looking. So I mapped out cloud formations:

and then I layered in four different shades of white (just in case you want to do this yourself the colors were Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace, Vanilla Ice Cream and then a mixture of Vanilla Ice Cream + Peach Parfait and a mixture of Vanilla Ice cream + Majestic mauve) to give the clouds depth. Painting clouds and making them look real isn't that difficult (the trick is to dry brush--not a lot of paint on the brush and be willing to ruin your brush by scrubbing the color in with it), but it is time consuming--mainly because you have to keep going up and down the ladder to figure out each step. It took me a couple days until I was satisfied.

And while I liked how the winter white color of the walls brought out the whiteness of the clouds, I felt it was too cold for a baby's room. So we changed the wall color to a soft cream which makes the clouds look a little peachy--like a clouds at sunrise.