How to Paint Girly Rooms
When you have girls in your house, chances are you will need to paint a few girly rooms. Painting a girly room is like painting any other room, although attention should be paid to the trappings of youthful femininity. While "girly" is a subjective term, there are a few accepted societal conventions for what defines the term, including pastel colors, like pink, and delicate symbols like flowers or butterflies. Decorate a room with these archetypes and you'll have a room that will make your girls proud. Does this Spark an idea?
Other People Are Reading
Things You'll Need
- Plastic sheeting
- Painter's tape
- Primer
- Paint pan
- Paint roller
- Roller covers
- Flat brush
- Interior paint
- Cardboard
- Scissors
- Artist's acrylic paint
- Detail brushes
Instructions
-
-
1
Prepare the room. Lay plastic sheeting down on the floor of the room; arrange it so it is flush against the bottom of the walls. If there is decorative edging or trim on the bottom of the walls that you would like to remain unpainted, cover it with plastic sheeting and secure the sheeting to the wall with tape. Line the ceiling along the edges of the walls with painter's tape.
-
2
Pour paint primer into your paint pan. Paint pans have a deep end and a slanting shallow end; fill the deep end only.
-
-
3
Dip your flat brush into the paint pan, wiping off extra paint on the shallow end, then apply the paint to the top and bottom edges of the walls with the brush.
-
4
Dip the roller into the deep end of the paint pan and roll it on the shallow side of the pan until the paint is evenly distributed on the roller cover.
-
5
Apply the paint onto the portions of the wall not already painted by the flat brush. Do so with minimum overlap between strokes of paint, so that the layering of the paint is even across the entire wall. Allow the primer to dry until you can place a finger on the wall without paint sticking to your skin.
-
6
Pour the base color paint into a clean paint pan.
-
7
Use the flat brush to apply the base color onto the top and bottom edges of the walls.
-
8
Roll an even layer of the base color onto the roller.
-
9
Paint the color onto the majority of the walls with even rolls. Wait for that layer of paint to dry and repeat to add a second layer.
-
10
Cut stencils of decorative mural objects, such as flowers or butterflies, out of a sheet of cardboard.
-
11
Hold the stencil flat against the wall.
-
12
Pour the color you want to be the base color for the decorative object into a clean pan; for example, you might want a butterfly to be outlined in black between its details, so black would be the color you use to create the generic shape of the entire butterfly.
-
13
Dip a broad detail brush into your base color and paint in the entire empty space of the stencil.
-
14
Remove the stencil from the wall and allow the paint to dry. Unlike primer or interior paint, acrylic paint will dry within minutes if the immediate environment is not very humid. After ten minutes, lightly touch the acrylic. If the paint doesn't come off and feels a bit like hard plastic to the touch, it's completely dry.
-
15
Within the confines of your base color, paint finer details onto the object in acrylic to finish the image.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
For complexly detailed mural objects, such as a butterfly's wing pattern, it is recommended that you cut stencils to the wing's design, or adhere painter's tape to the outlines of desired areas of detail. With the stencil or painter's tape in place, even if you paint over the lines of the desired detail, the extra paint will be blocked by the covering, leaving the exact desired shape when you remove it from the wall.
If you make a mistake while painting a mural object, don't worry. Just stop, wait ten minutes for the acrylic to dry, then correct the mistake by painting over it. Be sure that the paint is dry before you do so, to ensure that you don't accidentally mix colors and make the mistake worse.
Stencils by themselves are best used when a wall's detail painting consists of small decorative objects along a border or spaced sparingly across the walls. A more comprehensive mural that spans an entire wall or room should be drawn out in pencil first. In other words, don't attempt to cut a stencil the size of the entire wall. However, stencils could be used to paint smaller objects within the mural.
