Montag, September 28, 2009

Artsy Weekend Project

Here's my really cool weekend project: a self-made wall tattoo.

I once found this wall tattoo saying "witch kitchen" in an online store, but never got around to buying it...

Firstly, I didn't like the bright red colour that much. Secondly, the bristles of the broom were on the wrong side for what I had in mind. Thirdly, wall tattoos don't stick too well to my woodchip walls.
That was when I decided to do it myself. And here is how I did it:

I used my favorite image processing software to put the bristles on the "right" side. No need to be super perfect as the image will only serve as a stencil. Also the resolution of the product picture was rather low, but this didn't matter much either. After printing it to the proper size (split across 3 pages), I used a pen to draw over the outline (making up for the aliasing effect of my low resolution image) before cutting out all the letters.

Since I had printed it to slightly self-adhesive paper, I could then stick my stencil right to the wall. Masking tape works quite well for this, too.
The next step was to bring the outlines of my stencil to the wall using a simple pencil. Small corrections can easily be made as the dark paint will cover them anyway.

The last step after taking off the stencil was colouring my wall tattoo with the chosen colour and fine paint brushes. This took about as long as the soccer game I listened to at the same time ;) I was shaking a bit every now and then while painting, but changing position and resting my hand to the wall (carefull with the wet paint!) helped quite a bit. Also small shaky bits didn't matter too much because of the uneven woodchip wall.


So this is what it looks like now :). Cool, he?
Actually the hardest part was not to bump my head on the overhead cupboards and to be able to reach over my counter to paint the wall. It might be a good idea to paint a wall tattoo like this one BEFORE adding the furniture :).

The best part about it though: I didn't have to spend a single cent for my cool new wall tattoo! The paint was a leftover from a friend. You need really little for an image like this.