A Boy's Room

27 November 08

Last spring I bought my son a suite of matching bedroom furniture. The pieces are designed to look nautical; all blue and white with pretend portholes and orange lights. My wife and I decided to run with the theme and paint our son’s room in a related way.

Wallpaper seems to be fairly popular in France, much more so that I ever remember it being in the States. Whether that’s an old fad slow to die or a factor of income (wallpaper considered to be a cheaper way to go here)…I don’t know. What I do know is I’m generally not a fan of wallpaper. I’ll take walls with a few nicks and patched holes if it means having a nice coat of paint I can change color of without too much fuss and glue. The house we recently bought was filled with wallpaper. We are de-papering the entire house, going with paint, and perhaps following up with some new moulding.

Boy Blue

Wall paint sea and sky colors without waves.

Sea and sky base colors.

Deciding where to start wasn’t too hard. The previous owners had two girls, and each had their own room. We have a boy and a girl, and since our son needed something more to his sensibilities, that was the first room to do.

To paint our son’s room, we decided on two colors for sky and sea. We didn’t want to end up with two shades of blue (sky blue, for example) so sky in this case was a creamy cloud color. The blue was a bit trickier. It couldn’t be too dark because it was going on the bottom half of the walls and the room only has one little window for natural light. We also didn’t want it to be too similar to the furniture’s blue or the furniture would go chameleon against it. We settled on a color called “bleu garçon“ (boy blue) and it seems to work okay, if not exactly marine-ish.

Waves

To meet the sea and sky, we went with the obvious pattern — waves. This was another area of consideration because the waves could have been done a variety of ways. I was ambitiously thinking of all the cool ideas, such as sponging waves on for the Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave effect, or going with a spiral motif like sometimes seen on old Greek vases, but in the end my wife’s desire to use a stencil from the local paint store won out. / sound of deflating balloon here /

Stencils are a good idea if you are short on time, patience and skills. However, stencils have a big problem: the sticky stuff on the back doesn’t stay sticky very long. After a couple applications paint starts getting under the edges, the nice clean lines aren’t so nice anymore, and the template cursing begins. To help prevent degradation of quality, I had to painstakingly press with contorted fingers on each curve of the stencil while applying wave after wave around three of the four walls. It was necessary to go back and smooth the blotches out here and there with a free-hand, killing some time saved from using a stencil to begin with, but all-in-all things turned out pretty good.

Bridging sea and sky with waves.

Like all houses in the region we have steep roof angles. This effects every room on our second floor; giving each a wall having a sharp slope. We decided to break the wave pattern on our son’s sloped wall by doing rolling waves instead of the surfs-up style via the stencil. The calmer seas, as it were, gives it a sense of getting closer to shore.

We plan to do some additional patterns on this wall, but the verdict is still out. My ideas are always a bit more elaborate, and thus don’t always equate with being practical against time, effort and materials. For example, I had thought painting an island on this wall would, naturally, make the shallower water effect more clear. The island would be viewed as if from a camera lens that is partially submerged so you would see the island above and below water. Above could be your typical gold sand and palm thing, or it could be a mountainous mass thickly covered in jungle with a few tropical critters perched here and there. The island below would reflect the kinds of things you might see in shallow depths, such as corals, seaweeds and colorful fish. As you can imagine, this is a LOT of work, because it’s all done by hand. It could also be a fair sum of money once all the different paint colors were purchased.

Another inspiration of mine is to put the Yellow Submarine) under the waterline with extended periscopes breaking surface. This would be fun and considerably less work, albeit less suggestive of shallower water.

The Yellow Submarine

The infamous Yellow Submarine.

My wife, however, knowing not of the sub (being younger and French), says it will be more mono-color stencil work for palms, lighthouses and a boat or two. I can always put the Yellow Submarine on a different wall, it will still work in deep water and better so, but the elaborate island is scrapped for now.

I’m pretty sure my boy would pick the island jungle and submarine even at his tender age of 2-½, but considering all that needs done elsewhere in the house still, my wife is sensibly right in keeping it simple for now.

  1. teles  ·  29 November 08

    nice :)

    if you want to have a palm tree you can draw it with cdrom, and you got a mirror too, i did it in my last house and when I was student, very nice! I will send you photos ;)

  2. Destry   ·   6 December 08

    Hi Teles! Yeah, send me the photos, because I’m a little lost by what you mean. :/