This recent client in Wellesley, MA was working with her designer to add some interest to her primary bedroom walls when they called us! Most of the walls had paintings or mirrors, but the large wall (12’ high by 17’ wide) behind the bed looked too plain, and the scale of the wall was making it difficult to find a solution.
Designer Donna Hochman of Distinctive Interiors had the idea of using criss-crossing lines in tones of dark gray to complement the rest of the room and asked us to come up with a design.
After taking some measurements and drawing a to-scale framework of the wall, I worked with basic ideas of composition to lay out the lines on my smaller version painting. The idea was to make it look random, but still balanced across the wall. We also wanted to create interest and motion with multiple lines, but still keep it simple enough to prevent the wall from looking too busy. Finally, we wanted the lines to look hand-painted with brush strokes and imperfections.
With a couple of tweaks to my design, we had a look everyone was excited about. The next step was to choose the perfect charcoal color and come up with translucent versions so the stripes would have varying levels of darkness. Making them translucent also created the opportunity for the darker overlap points of the lines to add another dimension to the overall design.
Once onsite, we measured out the lines to replicate my drawing and created a code to indicate which stripes would be darker or lighter. With this all done – we were on to painting!
Below are some shots of the final result – which Donna and homeowner were thrilled with!
Enjoy,
Jason
Close-up of intersecting line