So it is baby room time!!! Baby is on it's way and we have to get the room ready but it has to be done ahead of time to allow for any paint fumes to dry. But before we could even get started on just painting the room we needed a theme, so we went for the Hawaiian under sea theme. Something simple like fish and coral and maybe a turtle or two and a hut and a dolphin jumping out of the water.......hey wait one minute... who is going to do this? Ok, maybe a bit optimistic to be taking on a four, maybe five wall mural on someone's spare weekend time but with baby steps we might just get to this level of detail. So the plan is to incorporate as many elements as reasonably possible in the shortest time allowed. So where to start such a project. Well, we thought that we should at least have the room painted with sky and water and we could work out the fish with stickers at first and slowly add elements with time permitting. In order for me to get an idea of the canvas size and how I wanted to lay out the elements in the room, I needed to measure each wall and dimension them and the location of windows, doors, light fixtures and also the portion of the roof that protrudes into the dormer room. The images below are these sketch out walls with the intended design.

The above image is the colour swatch that will be used. Two green-blue for the sea and two blues for the sky and one sand. And what better way to visualize the colours than using them in the design sketches from above. One was done in the Iphone using the AutoDesk app which has a good starting colour palette but not exactly the colours I wanted. I later discovered that more colours could be selected but I wasn't going to perform this exercise twice with this device. Fun and painful at the same time if you know what I mean. The second was rendered using the correct colours and photoshop.

I had procrastinated for what seemed to be an eternity, so why not extend the wait and have a practice attempt on a wall that I care so little about....say, the basement wall. And that is what I did.

I'm still a bit undecided on which of the two is more suitable for the room's look. I think I nailed the horizon and the sky but where I seem to still have difficulties is the water level and how to make it look real in the sense that from the viewer's point, you are semi submerged as if snorkeling and you can see both above and below the level of the water. I will have to decide soon.

The final touch will be the detail such as the fish and coral. It has been a good 6 years since I made any attempt to draw or sketch so I was a bit nervous. If that wasn't enough, I added another layer of complexity and stress by purchasing an airbrush system and wanting to airbrush the fish. Now this would be a non-issue for most artists but I ,in all honesty, have never used an airbrush before but I was keenly up for a challenge. The above fish were drawn on the second day of having the airbrush unit. I am pretty stoked about the possibilities.

So finally I bit the bullet and taped up the room and proceeded to paint! I started out by rolling on the dark blue sky colour on the ceiling with little to no issues but then I fell into my first mistake. For some reason, the paint gun really never spayed enough paint on the wall and it literally took 2 hours to paint the light blue sky. I would have been better off rolling on the paint for all the colours and using the spray gun to spray in the transition effect. Well, this is what I plan to do.....soon.