Brown on brown

STENCILING IS HAPPENING.  Well, almost.  Remember my stencil plans for the the hallway?  You know, the plans relating to the stencil purchased in July 2012 and then allowed to languish in my storage closet?  To refresh your memory, here's the black and white outline.

It's something like 3 feet tall and about 8 inches wide.  After being decisive enough to purchase the stencil in the first place, I then became racked with paralyzing indecision about what colors to actually use in my stenciling, hence the year-long delay.  I toyed with some different ideas, represented here with some incredibly bad use of Paintbrush.

Neither of these options felt particularly fabulous to me.  (In case these colors seem like they're coming totally out of nowhere, remember that I have a bright green kitchen that connects to this hallway and a lot of reds, oranges, and yellows in the dining room.  Here's a pic of the kitchen and the hallway where they meet to refresh your memory.)

My fear was that the combination of the bright white floors and trim, plus the warm brown and the kind of intense green just around the corner would be too overwhelming for such a small space.  If I went with a lot of color, it seemed like it might be walking a fine line with the kind of aesthetic usually reserved for an amusement park.

Luckily, I have smart friends!  I consulted my friend Shannon, who wisely suggested that instead of introducing more color into that tiny space, I could just use lighter and darker variations on the brown of the walls.  This would achieve the goal of adding something visually interesting without going all crazy Disneyworld on the hall.  Huzzah!  I mocked something up (using my aforementioned Paintbrush skills) to give you a sense of what it will look like:

Way better, right?  It's still fun, but looks a little more - dare I say - elegant than the other versions.  I'm really excited about this solution (thank you, Shannon!).  I went out and bought the paint and finally took the stencil out of its box.  Yes, that's right, I hadn't even taken it out of its box for a whole year.  I really, REALLY put this project off.

So you can imagine I was not surprised that, after being rolled up for over a year, the plastic stencil was not able to lie flat.  This is kind of a crucial part of the success of the stencil so you don't get paint behind it, so I'm opting to wait a bit for it to straighten itself out.

In the meantime, I started playing around with some newspapers to see what kind of layout I might want on the wall, and here's what I've come up with for the far corner.

The newspapers are just representative of what kind of heights I might want on the flowers, but I could certainly make more short ones nearer the ground.  Doing the tall ones will be particularly difficult, I think, because of the stems.  See the "flower" second from left in the picture above?  That's how big the actual stencil is.  So if I want to go taller than that (which I do), I'll need to manually extend the stem all the way down.  I'm anticipating that will be the hardest part of doing this project.  It could easily start to look janky if I'm not on the ball.

Anyway, that's a problem for another day.  For now I'm just going to let the stencil straighten out and keep playing with my newspapers.