Back on the stencil horse!

After a hiatus of almost a year, I put my painting pants back on (literally and figuratively) and got down to some hardcore stenciling.  Without further ado, here's a first look:

Whaddya think?  I'm digging it.  So let's back up to how we got here.  Last weekend I had laid everything out on the walls with newspapers (heights of the flowers, that is), and was flattening the stencil.  This weekend I was ready to get going with some actual paint.  I decided to start with a little test version on a cardboard box I had laying around.

I got out my base color from the hallway wall painting job of last summer, and got out my little test pot of white paint, mixed it up, and came up with a lighter version of the wall color.

Then, I sprayed some stencil glue (yep, that is a thing that exists) on the back and taped it down to try to get it to lay flat, and started smooshing paint onto it with this weird little foam spongey thing.

Pretty soon, I had a nice-looking little flower!

It looked pretty good for a first try, but I did learn a valuable lesson about what can happen when the paint gets behind the stencil.  See the lower left corner, some of the paint kind of ran a bit?  Yeah, gotta watch out for that.

So, feeling pretty good about that first baby step, I decided to approach the wall.  But since I was still a little gun-shy, I started on a teeny tiny flower on a hard-to-see strip of wall in between the back door and the bathroom door.  Technically, it worked fine, but I'm glad I started with this less-visible flower because it turns out that my paint color was just a little too subtle.  See how you can barely tell there's a flower here?  Like there once was one, and then someone tried to scrub it off but it left some weird residue?  Yeah, not the look I'm going for.

So, I decided to go back to the drawing board with this color and added a ton more white.  That helped a LOT.  Feeling a little more confident, I moved on to some of the more visible walls.  And voila!  Project Stencil was finally underway.

In order to do some of the taller ones, I needed to figure out a way to make the stems long enough to reach the ground.  I found that once I painted all the way down to the end of the stem, I could pull off the stencil and turn it around 180 degrees to match up the part where the stem left off to where I would start painting again.  Here's a picture where you can see what I'm talking about (which is probably easier to understand than the description I just wrote):

 It seemed like it worked pretty well, so I decided to keep going with it.  I did a few flowers in this color, then mixed up a slightly darker one and did a few more.

Here's where the first wrench got thrown in.  I had bought a test pot of black paint to mix a slightly darker color to use for a few of the flowers.  I put a little black in, and it looked kind of greyish and not dark enough, so I added more.  And then a little more.  Finally, it looked like this - not exactly an appealing thing to put on the walls.  Oops.

I did some quick thinking and decided the best way to fix it would be to run to the hardware store and buy a brand new test pot of a color that was in the same family as the base coat, but darker.  That way, if I needed to lighten it I could using the white, or maybe it would just work as is.  Either way, it wouldn't turn into a weird muddy color like the previous one had.  Turns out that was a decent plan.  I found a dark brown color (enticingly called "Hidden Valley") that I thought fit in with the general color scheme, and went home and continued with the stenciling.  Whew! 

So one problem solved, but of course I knew it couldn't be that easy.  I hadn't screwed up my stenciling...until now.  When I did the first flower in this new color I must have used too much paint on the brush, because it got super-smudged.  It doesn't look so bad from far away...

...but when you get up close to it you can see where things went awry.

Still, it's small enough and so far away from eye level that I'm not sure I care too much about fixing it up.  At least not right now.  So I kept moving with the other flowers, and after about four hours of total work, that half of the hallway is done!

I've still got several walls I need to do before the whole hallway is done, but I feel like I've made good progress for today.  I'm rewarding myself with some wine and Indian food, but before I dug into that I put up some more newspapers to plan out my next moves on the remaining walls.

That last one is kind of awkward-looking, but I'll figure something out.  Wish me luck, readers!  Next time you hear from me I should have lots more artsy-looking dandelions on the walls.