#plaid paint

Just Being Myself: A Journal Page

For this months design team post for The Crafter’s Cafe Challenge Blog, I chose Octavia the Ostrichfrom Dr. Digi’s House of Stamps. The theme this fortnight is birds. My first thought was a cute card, but I just never felt inspired. I flipped through my journal and found a page that I had covered with scrapbook paper. I immediately envisioned the ostrich standing right there so I got to work…

I don't think this gentleman's brain was fully awake this morning...

He was looking for black fabric paint. I took him to the fabric paint/dye aisle and picked up the bottle of black fabric paint and handed it to him.

Man: "are you sure this is black?"

Me: "yes sir."

Man: "but it says plaid right here." He points to the label.

Me: "that's the brand name, sir. Here is the color; licorice, which is a black."

Unless you want to lose your fucking mind.

But if you want to go insane, here’s the easiest way to do it:

First, you pick your paint colors.  I decided to go with blues, because why the fuck not?

Step 1: Paint your base color on the wall.  Here you can see that I didn’t bother painting too close to the holes in the wall from the hardware, because I was being silly.  I decided that the background color would be a baby blue.  Looked a little less blue on the swatch, but whatever.

Step 2: Tape off your lines.  Pretend not to notice that your wall is curved and indented and shit and you’ll never get it perfect.  Give in to that agony.

The painter’s tape used at this stage was this standard blue shit.

Step 3: PAINT OVER YOUR TAPE WITH YOUR BASE COLOR.  The internet told me to do this, so I did.  

I didn’t take any images of that step, so here’s more of my shitty taping job.

Step 4: Fill in every other line or whatever the shit you want your pattern to look like with your next color.  I chose to add a color that I hadn’t picked initially: ALMOST BLACK (a dark grey color called “Pencil lead”).

Don’t worry about anything you fuck up, because you’ll definitely have to do touch ups afterward.  (Do some touch ups now if they’re ugly smudges like I have in a few spots)

I decided that I was going to fix the lines around the ceiling and baseboards after it was all done, so I kinda threw caution into the wind and just went bananas at times.  

But, hey, it turns out that that whole “paint over it with that color of paint that already exists” thing has some merit.  These lines look sharp in most spots.

Step 5: tape off for the next set of lines.  I was a lot more precise with my measuring for these ones.  I went a little anal retentive.

I used a combination of that same standard blue painters tape and some of this fancy shit:

I had tried to figure out how the shit I was going to seal the paint edges without being able to easily perform my “just paint the edges the color of the background”...because now I had two background colors.

So, I found this shit and decided to give it a whirl.  

Step 6: Paint the new lines and try not to murder anyone.

Success.  So, again, you can really notice that the wall is not exactly perfectly flat.  I’m not sure where the construction-dudes found convex drywall, but props to them for being interesting and inventive.

I’ll go into more detail at the end of this post about the tape and what I experienced with all of the tapes I tried.  

Step 7: Tape up some mothafookin more lines and try not to kill yourself.

You’ll notice that there’s no picture here.  The reason for that is that I switched to this fancier tape (costs $2 more per roll) which touted this shit called “edge lock.”  It wouldn’t stick to the wall long, so I had to tape, paint, tape, paint, tape, paint.  WEEEEE

Step 8 (the REVEAL): Paint your final fucking lines and try not to punch holes in the wall.

You may be thinking: Shit!  That looks great (minus the ceiling and baseboards)!

You’re wrong. And I’ll show you why while breaking down the processes from the tapes.

Here’s a closeup image of the lines.  

First off, the colors in this image aren’t accurate, but there is no need to color-correct to make my point.  And the angle of my camera distorted the line directions (they’re far straighter vertically than they appear).  Whatever.  

By FAR, the lines made with the initial tape/painting the base-color (1) down before painting the stripes (2) was the best.  I don’t think that this method requires fancy tape or shitty tape, as long as the tape sticks and you paint the base color atop the tape to seal the leakage off, you’re golden.

The orange frog tape with the strange mixture shit (seen above) was used to paint the double lines (3).  This was definitely second place, but I advise to make sure you really get that clear shit on there good before you go for it, as you can see there are some significant leaky spots.   Also of note, if you look at where the color meets from 2 and 3, you’ll see what looks like the paint from 3 spooged a little onto 2.  By spooge, I mean white’ish discharge.  The spooge is the clear shit that helps lock the frog tape edges to provide crisp lines.  If you look in the finished image, you can spot places on the dark paint that this spillover occurred.  Barf.

Something else the clear stuff did? I used a flat paint.  The clear shit is glossy.  Any spots on the base color that got that shit on it?  They’re now shiny.  I’ll have to touch those up with the base color to re-flattify those fuckers.

So, I only recommend using the frog tape clear stuff (and I certainly think it’s worthwhile if you are more patient than myself) is if you’re using a semi-gloss paint and the colors aren’t as dark as my soul.

The final color was painted on with the tape that has at least 20 minutes of made-up songs (by me) about how horrible it is.  Look at the lines from 4 above.  They’re fuzzy and crappy.  Edge lock fail.  To even get a line out of this tape (and I was fucking determined to), I had to continually smooth over my tape to make sure it stayed put, or the shit would just straight up detach and fall off the wall. No joke.  I was fighting the clock with this tape.  I don’t know if it doesn’t like flat paint, or textured walls, or some combination therein, but I was certainly hitting its no-no triggers.

Knowing that I was somewhat doing this for shits and giggles, I decided to persevere and make it through this project with the crappy taaaappppppeeee, the crappieesssttt of alllll the taaapppppeesssss (**sings**).

Anyhow, that’s my journey to plaid walls and I will probably go crazytown bananapants and just paint it over a solid color after I try touching things up to make the lines better.  If I even get the motivation to do that.