Skill level: Easy
Time: 1–2 hours (not including drying time)
Color used: Dark gray
Want an easy way to spruce up your place? Paint a few palm leaves.
This wall painting how-to is excerpted with permission from "Wonder Walls: How to Transform Your Space with Colorful Geometrics, Graphic Lettering, and Other Fabulous Paint Techniques" by Roxy Prima and Phobe Cornog.
This design is a great way to bring foliage into your home if you don’t have a green thumb. We used gray to keep the look more subtle, but feel free to be bold and add color. This super-simple project won’t take you hours to complete, but it certainly takes your space up a few notches!
We almost always prefer to use white chalk because it can be easily wiped off after painting. Pencil marks are more difficult to get rid of since you either need to erase or paint over them. In our case, our wall background was light gray, so the white chalk was visible.
Our design includes about six groups of palm leaves, but depending on the size of your wall, you can add more or use fewer.
Tools:
1 drop cloth
1–2 small brushes
Step stool or ladder
Materials:
1 roll of painter’s tape
Chalk or pencil
1 sample size dark gray paint
Prepping:
Move anything out of the area that you don’t want to get paint on. Create a nice, open space where you can get dirty (but hopefully not too dirty)! Lay out your drop cloth to cover the ground and tape off any trim or adjoining walls. Use a credit card or gift card to smooth out the tape and make sure it’s tight against the wall; otherwise, paint can seep underneath.
Sketching:
Lightly sketch your palm leaves using a piece of chalk or a pencil. You can get as detailed and obsessive as you’d like. We kept ours loose and free-flowing, so it didn’t take very long to sketch everything out.
Painting:
Paint the main stem of a palm leaf. This will dictate where the small leaves (leaflets) branch out from. The leaflets don’t have to be perfect, so embrace the brushy look! The less paint you have on your brush, the more transparent your leaves will look. Definitely don’t overload your brush with paint, because you might drip onto the wall in places you didn’t want paint.
If possible, work your way from the top of the wall to the bottom. It’s nice to get the higher-up stuff over with so that you’re standing on a ladder while you're fresh. Work on the leaves at the top, then repeat on the bottom.
Email
Like
Tweet
Responses
(1 comment)