Children’s Artwork Bunting Mural
Yet another way of using some of the piles of children’s artwork that you can accumulate, this is a cheap and easy way to add some colour to a child’s room, using their own artwork. I’ve been meaning to do this project for weeks now, because my elder son’s room has never been properly decorated as a child’s room should be. Not that it appears to have bothered him in any way – he seems to be one of those people (frequently male) who have a complete unconcern for the environment he lives in. When I completed the project, I didn’t tell him, but left it as a surprise. It was some time before he mentioned it, in fact I thought at first he hadn’t noticed, but if nothing else, he’s observant and it turned out that he had noticed, but obviously hadn’t considered it important enough to mention. Sigh… Still, some of you may have more appreciative children, so I thought I’d share it here.
The first step was to cut out triangles for the bunting from the artwork I’d selected. I mainly used artwork that was rich in colour, with not too much white background showing, and on paper which was thin enough to stick easily to the wall.
My original intention was to make this a ‘temporary’ project which could be easily removed if we were ever lucky enough to be able to sell the house. I abandoned that idea when I discovered that the repositionable spray glue I had first chosen wasn’t strong enough to keep the paper attached firmly to the wall, so I resorted to using permanent spray glue instead.
To establish where to attach each piece of paper, I pinned one end of a piece of string to the wall and then pinned up loops around the walls, just as if I were hanging real bunting. This made it easy to position each ‘flag’ in relation to the string, spacing them out along the line as I went. I then used a piece of chalk to draw a temporary guide line where the string ran.
Once this was done, the string was removed and I painted over the chalk line and the top of each flag with some acrylic paint, using a fine brush. You could probably use a medium or broad marker pen instead to do this if you preferred.
Of course you don’t have to use children’s artwork for this project, you could use wrapping paper, or any colourful or decorative paper you can find. And while bunting is a particularly simple and effective motif to use, you could instead cut out simple petal or leaf shapes to create a tree, branch or flower garland for your wall instead.
Photographing this project was astonishingly hard work, given that it’s a fairly small room and I don’t have a very wide angle lens. Hopefully the images I managed to get give some impression of what was overall, a wonderfully fun and colourful project, even if the intended recipient wasn’t particularly impressed : /
