Bring on the wall!

Two years after moving in and we've still not finished work on the house. One part that's annoyed me for ages is the 3 x 6 metre stairs wall. It's a funny shaped wall and because of this trying to hang picture on it would just look a mess, like an Ikea monster had vomited chunks of contemporary art onto the wall.

A few months back I decided that we should have a single image on the wall that fits in with the odd shape. To keep things cheap this invariably meant we'd have to paint something on to it by hand.

I knew from the start that it would either look incredibly cool or like the work of a crayon weilding manboy. So, to reduce risk we took a methodogical approach that involved photoshop, a projector, a macbook, step ladder, wall paint from the shed, ikea pencils, a week of painting & a bit of guess work. The actual pattern is derived from a collection of Photoshop Brushes, available here. You can load these in GIMP using the instructions here. Here's a few pictures:


The scale plan we knocked up in Photoshop


Projecting the plan


This photo is only part of the image, it actually goes further down the stairs with some huge flowers.

My dad once painted an awesome Star Wars wall mural in mine and my brother's bedroom (I'll try and dig out some pictures). He did this all free hand in multicolour, with a little help from the 'how to draw Star Wars' book, which makes our monotone technologically assisted job seem a bit weak. If only there was a 'How to draw Evil Dead II' book. That would be awesome. We'd need a lot of red paint though.

[Updated post on 14/12/08 to point to the actual brushes file I used and explain how to open brush files in GIMP]