Pink Mountains & a Rising Sun

We moved to Polk City in 2017 and then two years later I decided we should sell our house. Long story short, my husband just shakes his head and goes along with a good majority of my crazy antics. Fast forward to 2021.. I start my own painting business, post some pictures to the Polk City Facebook groups and the Mom who bought our old house reached out to me to change my son's old room into something a little cuter for her daughter!

My son's room was painted in red, white and blue stripes with a gray background. Brenda sent me pictures of her daughter's room décor & I searched pinterest and sent her some ideas. She ended up choosing this image that she wanted recreated on her daughter's wall.

Oh boy. I am great with straight lines and tape. But, this is curved mountains, multiple colors and LOOK AT ALL THOSE SUN RAYS. I had my work cut out for me. I was excited to start this project!

First thing first - draw it out on the wall.. The mountains took a few hours to get the shapes and angles right. Then I moved on to drawing the sun. Ok, so my thought process behind this was that I wouldn't have enough blue to cover up the whole wall and then paint on top of it. I SHOULD HAVE PAINTED THE BACKGROUND FIRST!!! You'll understand why in a minute. Live and learn.

I get the circle of the sun the way I want it, by using some string. Hold the string in the center of where I want the sun to be, pull the string out tight and draw - similar to a giant compass tool.

Next step, the rays. How am I going to get them to all be the same width? The same angles? The straightness? The same?!?! This took some thinking, some trial and error and a lot of time. The best thing I came up with: Draw on the outside of the sun circle - make a mark every two inches. I put a tack in the middle of the sun and then lined my string up with the mark on the outside and stretched the string to the end of the wall. From there, I zig zagged my way through the sun, making sure I hit every mark on the outside and came back to the middle.

Once the string was up, I went back and used my ruler to draw each line. Took down all the string, and put up tape. So much tape. So much time. Ready for those orange rays! Please note, orange paint is similar to yellow -- it takes more than two coats to cover up gray, red, blue and white. So many coats.

Once I thought the paint was dry enough, I started peeling off the tape. Ok, when you have sooo many layers of paint, you need to give it some extra drying time. Otherwise, you go to pull off the tape and the paint will come with. Which it did in multiple spots. And I wanted to cry. I made myself stop pulling tape, focus on the pink mountains and then gave it a night to finish drying.

The next day, the tape peeled off nicely. Reminder - don't rush the dry time.

Next up, the blue. This is when I realized that WHY THE F*$!? DID I NOT PAINT THE BLUE FIRST?! Back to taping every line. So. Much. Tape. So. Much. Time. Live and learn. Deep breaths.

Overall, it turned out beautiful. It's bright, girly and perfect for a little gals room. Brenda painted the rest of the walls pink to match the mountains. Happy family!

Enjoy two days shrunk down to one minute!