Painting A Wall Mural-1st Vignette Done

If you've been following my posts, you'll know that I recently completed a very large mural wall (see it HERE).  That mural was done on what I call "the money wall" lol.  It's the first thing you see walking into a room.  But I also wanted to make sure that the kids in the nursery had other ocean scenes to view so I started base painting three small vignettes around the room plus something in the bathroom.  Today's post features the completion of the first scene.

To start, I used a very large level and tape measure to pencil off the space I wanted to use for the design.  I then put up painters tape on the outside of that line.  A quick seal with some poly around the taped edges (so that the base coat wouldn't seep under the tape) and then I painted the water using my lightest shade of blue and a brown for the sand. In the picture above, you see that after that painting was done, I only peeled off the top portion of the tape.  That was because a very messy part was coming next...creating the sand!  I actually taped newspaper all around the brown area so that the walls would be protected when I spattered on three colors of paint (dark brown, medium brown and ivory) to turn the plain brown paint into "sand". 

Next I painted in the main design, using the same colors I had also used on the main wall.  You see that I needed to work around the changing table.  This was one reason I decided to put a "shallow scene" here.  The sand dressed up the painting even though the bottom had to remain bare.  After this step, I made a copy of this picture and drew in the other elements with a pencil on the copy.  This way I could see how I wanted the details to look before ever putting paint on the wall.  Much easier to design on paper first! 

Here is the finished wall!  I think it's my favorite so far.  Probably because I LOVE bling!  lol  Which is why I've included this close up of the treasure chest! 

I'll be featuring the rest of the vignettes in future posts.