Wall Tattoo Project (Part I)

Here's Yet Another Wall Tattoo Project (YAWTP):

I started out with a set of wall tattoo stickers I have bought a while ago but have never used. Actually I moved away from the place I intended to use the tattoos at and in my new place the color just didn't fit in.

Luckily I still found a way to use them :)

I have bought pink paint for my bedroom which sported plain white walls ever since I moved in.


However, painting the whole room in pink would be boring - even a whole wall would be, so decided to use the wall tattoo as some kind of inverted stencil.

Before painting the wall, I stuck the different parts of the tattoo to the wall.

The only nasty part about this project was the fact that the tattoo has a transparent border - to make the delicate parts more durable I guess. This transparent border would spoil my very own version of the tattoo, as the paint will not show all those litte details. The only way to deal with that was to cut away the border.


I used small scissors and all this cutting hurt my thumb... So this is probably easier with wall tattoos with less details or without transparent borders ;)

When all stickers were placed on the wall I painted it in pretty pink, generously spreading paint all over the stickers. Afterwards I removed the stickers dumping them into the trash (Sorry stickers!).

Make sure to tightly press the edges to wall so the paint won't go between the wall and the stickers! You can see it didn't really stick to my woodchip walls...

I tried to fix some of the not-so-nice edges using Q-tips and a small paintbrush until I decided to just go with the funny effect.

And here's the final result. Not too bad, eh?

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.