The Cherry Blossom Nursery

As promised, I have the first shots of my (mostly) completed cherry blossom tree mural!

Now, there are tons of cherry blossom tree murals and wall decals online to choose from, so after looking at a bunch my friends Ray & Julianne decided they wanted a modern style, like this:

So here's what I ended up doing:

You can purchase the inspiration wall decal from the original artist on Etsy for around a hundred bucks with shipping, (and you should check out the rest of her store regardless; all of her kids' murals are soooo cute), which really isn't a bad price. I just wanted to try my hand at painting a kids' mural myself! When we were faux finishers I did lots of things: stripes, stencils, every finish you can imagine...but I never sketched something free-hand on a wall before this.

To begin we painted the room a very pale pink. Even with high quality paint, it took three coats to cover the dark beige already on the walls. (Blurgh.)

We did all our work over three nights, so most of these process shots will be blurry iPhone pics. Sorry.

Next I used one of the decal photos as a reference while I sketched a tree shape onto the wall using pink sidewalk chalk:


Chalk is great for this, since it wipes off easily and doesn't mess up the paint sheen. (Keep in mine we used satin for the base coat, though. Flat paint wouldn't be so forgiving.)

Next I filled in the trunk with a soft brown paint:

The trunk isn't really that small; that's just a giant paintbrush on the ground.

For the blossoms I found a simple clip-art shape of a five-petaled flower. I printed out three different sizes (I winged it on the sizes), traced them onto clear plastic report-cover sheets (the thick ones, not the flimsy page protectors), and cut those out to form stencils.

From there it was a matter of plotting out the three different sized flowers and filling them in with the two shades of pink we picked out. (We pulled colors from the crib bedding.) I used chalk again to get the flower placement started, and then later John marked some areas with blue tape:

For the stencils I used two tiny foam rollers - one for each shade of pink - and rolled from the edges in to avoid the paint bleeding underneath. I still had to touch up a few with a small brush later, though.

The final touch was adding centers to some of the larger flowers for a little added detail, plus a few buds to some of the branch tips.

Which gave us this!

Taken in daylight so you can finally get an accurate idea of the colors. :)
And here's a close-up of those flower centers:

I used a pencil eraser to make the large center dot, drew the stamen lines out with a small artist's brush, and then tipped each of those with another tiny dot made by dipping the wooden tip of my brush into the paint. It was a little time consuming, but the extra detail really made the flowers pop.

Next I'm working on a coordinating mobile, and we plan to add more painted flowers around the room once we get the furniture placed.

I gotta say: even though I'm not a kid person, I love working on nurseries. I'll take one of these over a boring formal dining room ANY day.

Speaking of which, this room is just across the hall from the Ninja Nursery we did a couple of years ago. I think the occupant approves; Julianne tells me that two-year-old Isaiah actually tried to hug one of the ninjas on his wall the other week. :D

When this nursery is completely done I'll be sure to take more pictures, so look for that in another month or two. (I just got an LED cherry blossom branch to use for a night light. Woot!)

Oh, and if you're looking for a much simpler way to make cherry blossoms, check this out:

Mind: Blown. Check out the full tutorial here. (And thanks to whichever one of you it was who sent me the link last week!)