I’ve been redesigning the guest room in my home, and it is becoming the most magical place in the world.
I started by painting the ceiling dark blue, with stars and galaxies to create a beautiful deep feeling. The walls were a bright yellow color originally. I wanted a blue-gold ombre color on the walls, so blended them from the dark blue of the ceiling through an emerald green and into the yellow. It looks gorgeous.
For the low part of the ceiling, I wanted to invoke an alchemical laboratory, or the Ravenclaw common room. I decided to create a mural up there. I’ve never done a ceiling mural before, and the texture on the ceiling is pretty bumpy which makes painting details pretty difficult. I’m also not the greatest illustration-style painter! Painting clean lines on a bumpy ceiling is hard.
Technology to the rescue. I used my Cricut Maker Vinyl Cutter.
The Cricut design space has a lot of downloadable designs, and I found both zodiac “statues” and zodiac symbols that I really liked. I chose shiny vinyl sticker material with various finishes and colors.. all metallic, but I used antique golds and bright golds and copper colors, with hammered finishes and shiny finishes and matte finishes. Mixing and matching all these different shades really adds a lot of depth and interest to my design.
For the details of the sun and planets, I used a combination of downloaded designs and original designs. I was easy to modify the downloaded designs using Cricut’s tools, and make them exactly what I wanted.
The mandala is maybe 8-10 feet across. Making giant circles can be tricky! For this part, my low-tech solution was to pound a nail into the middle of the circle and tie a string to it, with a pencil attached to the other end of the string. Then I could use the pencil like a giant “compass” and draw a perfect circle.
I used narrow copper tape to create the outer circles, then stuck the vinyl stickers in between. To add another dimension, the inner circles are painted in antique gold acrylic paint. I love this effect — the paint looks a bit rough and really sort of “old” — like, as though it’s a holdover from an earlier mandala that’s been restored or updated with the shiny vinyl.
I added planets and stars and details and I absolutely LOVE the finished result. 🙂
