In the second model home project with the interior design firm that contacted me recently, I was allowed a bit more creativity in designing the work. The designer on the project had a fairy tale girl’s room in mind- stone castle walls and a fairy tale tower scene on one wall to coordinate with all of the fun things she had planned for this girl’s room. After doing some research on the story I planned out a design and figured on three days to accomplish the painting of it in the room.

Day one, I drew level lines on the two walls as an aid in painting the stone blocks and plotted out the edges of the break-away area for the storybook landscape. I spent the morning working on the initial stages of the landscape before breaking for some lunch.

The balance of the day, I finished working blocking in the landscape, then carefully painted in the seams between the blocks of stone of the castle walls.

On the second day, I dedicated all of my time to mostly completing the landscape, knowing that I would have time to tweek it and add details on the third day.

In looking at this photo later in the day, I wasn’t happy with the amount of mist coming off the waterfall, so I spent a considerable amount of time reworking the area behind the tower as well as adding dimension and details to the foreground on the third day.

Using a some shades of the lavender wall color, I highlighted the edges of the break-away to give them dimension, and added some texture to the stonework I had previously painted to finish off the work.

Now tell me girls, wouldn’t you have loved this room when you were growing up?