Chevron wall - pink and white

Personalizing our personal spaces with colors is one of the big tool that we are using for dealing with change. I asked my girlie, what would she like to see in her room and she said,"it should be bright and cheerful and it should bring a smile to whoever is entering the room and that they should know that its my room even if I'm not there to welcome them. 

After that description, I didn't have the nerve to refuse painting the slightly labor intensive chevron pattern on the wall. It was a little intimidating but worked out in the end so I thought I'd share the process. I used a folkart chevron stencil to paint the room and it was bought from Jo-Anns using a 40% off coupon.

I found the horizontal center of the room and started at the bottom of the wall with the stencil working towards the edges of the wall and then moving up. I realized later that I didn't need to tape the wall for this process. I put pieces of painters tape and they made the stencil repositionable. I used a level across the entire bottom row to make sure any flaw in the baseboard didn't compound over the height of the wall.

For brushes I tried several different techniques like
1) circular stencil brush but the area was too large and the process too slow.  
2) a small 3.5" roller brush but it pushed a lot of paint under the template and increased the post stencil clean up. It also made the template heavy at the edges and so leveling it became frustrating.
3) The technique that worked best and was most balanced was to use my cutting brush along the template lines on stencil boundary. It was reasonably fast with minimal touch up for later.

It took about 8 minutes on an average to tape and level the stencil and about 5 minutes to paint it. If I were to do this process again, I'll possibly buy a couple extra stencils, so I won't have to wait for them to dry and I could also cut one of them to fit around the edges.

Since this stencil was mainly straight lines I could come back and with the help of measurements draw lines with cutting brush and fill in.

After that I took a small painters brush and cleaned up the edges, some leaks that made their way under the template and others that were made because I was too impatient to wait for the template to dry up completely. 

The touch up part took the most amount of time mainly because of the texture of the wall, its orange peel so it was very tough to get it perfect and of course after a while the fatigue of the repetition sets in. And then it was time to say 'good enough' and push the bed against the wall. 

We used fussy pink (SW6853) and antique white (SW 6119) by sherwin williams for the pattern colors and like usual it was chosen by the owner of the room.
This is where the room stands now. I'll share more updates as we move along…