My Lilac Tree

Did I tell you that I was planning on painting a mural? Well, I wanted to do it for the longest time, but it always seemed so difficult. I'm just not that handy, especially with paint and brush. So then I thought about these stick-on murals, but they were too expensive.

Finally, a few days before the New Year, I decided to give it a shot. I found the picture I liked by googling "tree mural" and looking through the Images.

It seemed simple enough to draw on the wall even without a template or an overhead projector (which I don't have any way and have no idea where to get). But just in case, I decided to draw an outline with chalk. I highly recommend it because if you make any mistakes, it's so easy to fix - just wipe the outline clean with a damp paper towel.

Took me maybe 20 minutes to do the outline, but turns out I drew the tree a bit too far from the corner. Thank goodness I used chalk! So I erased everything and drew it again, this time in maybe 15 minutes. I bet if I tried a few more times, I'd set some sort of record.

I had to leave the tree unpainted for a few days because I didn't have any paint. Originally I wanted to paint it offwhite, kind of ghostly. And so yesterday I went to Lowe's to look for some offwhite paint. Fortunately, they had just what I needed and it was in the mark-down section for only $2.01 for a quart. Apparently, someone custom mixed it, but the color didn't turn out the way they wanted. Whatever, looked good to me.

But when I started painting at home, the weirdest thing occured - instead of whitish, the paint turned the most gentle shade of lilac. It was the exact shade you can sometimes see in PB Kids catalog. Wow! Actually, it turned out more beautiful than white would've ever been. And it worked so well with the existing wall color.

Since I wanted an elfish, dreamy, not all-together-in-the-room feel, I only put 1 coat of paint. So now I have a ton of gorgeous paint left over. Frankly, I was loving my mural so much that I wanted to paint more trees all over the family room, but Hubby looked a bit spooked at the idea.

So I forced myself to calm down and instead drew a little bird (copied from a Twitter background).