Kids Playroom – Floral Wall Art

I have been ITCHING to share the beginnings of our playroom. A few months ago I found this post on Pinterest (of course!) and it was an “AH-HA” moment. I knew it was what we needed in our playroom.

Here is a picture from Petite Vintage Interiors – the inspiration for our room:

I have since wondered how I could recreate this look. I thought about making a shadow box and projecting it on the wall. I thought about making stencils on my Silhouette. I thought about trying my hand at free hand painting (scariest option). When it ultimately came time to start painting, I decided to freehand it. Why? Because I was anxious to get my hands dirty and didn’t want to spend any more time prepping for this project. Sometimes this ‘jump right in’ strategy comes back to bite me, but luckily this time it worked out!

I started by marking the wall in large sections that I wanted to fill with paint colors. It took me about an hour to paint all the background color swatches. I started out with smoothing the edges, but then after looking closer at the original picture, I left them looking unfinished/raw (easy!).

After the paint dried I penciled in the flowers and plants. Then it was just a matter of filling in what I had sketched out. I followed the original picture pretty closely, but added a few details of my own since my wall seemed bigger than the wall in the picture.

It is difficult to see, but this is one of the sketched out plants.

My 3 year old ‘helped’ me paint some of the lower background colors, so I decided to make a stencil (with my Silhouette) to document the occasion. It says ‘Made by Mommy and Audrey’. I used the font “Pea Weenie”, a free download from dafont.com.

I just guessed on paint colors. I used Behr samples (in satin finish) from Home Depot, a few colors I already had on hand, and I also mixed some of the samples with white to get different shades of the same color.

Sugar Poppy (coral)
Hidden Sea Glass (turquoise)
Clover Patch (dark green)
Blowing Kisses (light pink)
Beacon Blue (dark blue)
Crystal Falls (light blue)

Here are the colors I used that I had on hand (not shown in the picture above): Valspar’s Olive Smudge (with white added – greenish brown stem color), Behr’s Pale Daffodil (yellow).

I used a variety pack of Hobby Lobby paint brushes (around $6) that I already had, and a couple of my bigger brushes from Lowes to get the job done. No need to spend a lot of money on a bunch of nice brushes for this project.

Now give me 80 months to figure out what I am going to do with the rest of the room. Seriously.

This project took me around 5 hours (total – but between drying time and kiddos, it spanned a week). It turned out just as I had hoped.

What do you think of our new mural?