Painting: Rainbow Dots

      We are decorating our playroom for the first time since we moved into our home over a year ago.  In the midst of having a baby and getting everything else decorated, we have left it towards the end.  Now that my girls are getting old enough to be able to use this room, I am really excited to see it finished, and this was the first step.  This wall is in our playroom, which we recently painted "Sharkey Gray" from Martha Stewart, though I had it mixed in Behr's Paint and Primer in one.  I love that stuff, and we really love the color - I could see us using it somewhere else sometime.
      I saw a really fun, different rainbow-ish wall in a home tour on Design Sponge and pinned it to Pinterest about 3 months ago, knowing I wanted to do something with it.  Somehow, I came up with making it into dots spaced evenly on a wall, and I just finished it.  Here's the reveal.



This paint treatment was really quite easy - I mean it this time.  The Plaid Wall I did a while back really did take a long time, but this one took just a couple of days working very sporadically to finish.  Here's what you need.



Seven different colors of paint in sample size
A Level
Your Wall Color Paint (Sharkey Gray in our case)
a Pencil
A Circle to trace (I used a lid)
A Paintbrush (I used a craft paint brush, because I knew it would be easy to wash out between colors)

I actually started by figuring out how far apart I wanted my circles to be.  I settled on 1.5 inches apart.  My lid was about 7.5 inches across.  So, I figured that the middle of each dot needed to be 9 inches apart.  This made it simple to put dots every 9 inches in a level row.




I did 15 dots per row, and 7 different rows of color.  I found a clearish lid that had a center point so that I could see my marks through the lid and trace it.  Then, I traced the lid 105 times.  That actually sounds like a lot more than it felt like.

Then, I painted the 7 dots in the middle with the colors that I had picked out.  I used a craft paint brush and free-hand painted them.  After I got the hang of it, it went pretty quickly.



Because I wanted a "vanishing dot effect," I then started diluting the paint with a little bit of gray.  I put some on a paper plate.  With the yellow, I used way too much and ended up having a plate full of paint left over.



By the time I got to the darker orange, I had realized that you don't need very much, especially since I was mixing gray into it.



I used a paint stirrer to drizzle gray paint into whatever color I was using and mixed it with a paint brush.



With each dot away from the center, I mixed in a little more gray, so that it seems to blend into the wall more and more.  Overall, I am really pleased with the way it turned out, and I am very much looking forward to finishing out the playroom!





Carol is the wife of a small business-owner, mother to two little girls, crafter, very-amateur decorator, and occasional cooker.  She blogs at the John and Carol Show - wanna watch?