Recycling plastic lids and hummus containers are my favorite paint containers. The plastic lids from containers that mixed nuts or peanut butter are sold in make the best paint palettes. And they fit perfectly into empty hummus containers. I would use one plastic lid for each color set and then store them in the hummus containers. They would stay moist for a day or two until I could paint again. If they dried I could then scrape the lid and pull the old dry paint off (it peels off like plastic) and reuse the lid. Cheap and super handy!

One of my major concerns when paint the murals was to make the colors seem cohesive over the entire painting. I have the tendency to use color directly from the tube and that can make the images very jarring as one color clashes with another. A trick I picked up in art classes years ago is to use a base color that all other colors of the painting are mixed with. The color from the tubes are then treated as pigments, tinting the base color into various shades. With Madeline's mural I used two colors as a base, a beige and a turquoise. Arianna's mural used mostly a beige and just a little bit of a gray blue.

For Madeline's mural I created contact sheets of images that I used as inspiration. It was time consuming to collect the images from the web, compile them into pages, and then print them out. I tried collecting the images into to Flickr and Picasa and that too was time consuming requiring downloading and uploading images. I finally figured out creating a Pinterest board and then viewing the images with my tablet was the best option. Covering the screen of the tablet with cling wrap worked to protect the screen from paint.

During the painting process I discovered a trick that helped me work through some difficult parts. Whenever I found myself having to paint something that felt really challenging and stretched my skills outside of the comfort zone I would switch to painting with one of my smallest brushes. There was something about forcing me to make lots and lots of little marks that made the work look better. The little marks created more texture and forced me to make minute little details that can only be really seen up close. From a distance though they translated to highlights and shadows that overall made the painting look better. Changing brush sizes also made me change gears mentally; instead of trying to make the part fit into the whole painting perfectly, which became overwhelming, I just worked out that one little part. Once the fairy's face was working I could move on to making their body work. And then the wings, and then scenery around them, and so on.

I started working on her room back in October of 2011 with texture painting all of the walls and adding new paint to the trim. In November of 2011 I painted the arches of night sky and then the project sat, and sat, and sat until January 2013. Granted, was 6+ months pregnant and Arianna was born during that gap. After that it only took me about five months of working on the room off and on. It was definitely much harder to work around two kids than one.

All the painting supplies have been cleared out of Arianna's room and the walls have been washed. I'm going to vacuum tonight and maybe steam clean (children willing). Pretty sure this will be the cleanest her room will be until she moves out.

I found a minor mistake in the mural, something I marked to edit but then forgot about. I've decided to leave it. Years after I'm dead and scholars are studying my work they will wonder "what was this mark supposed to be?"

If the castle window is deemed done then that's it, I'm totally finished painting Arianna's room. Time to celebrate and move this baby girl into her own room!

I need a critical eye and Hunter is not here to help. Do you see the sun and the moon in this or is it too abstract?

No epic adventure is complete without a ship. The story playing out in Madeline's murals has a ship based on the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia). The story within Arianna's murals places us out on that ship, looking up, and dreaming about the sky. Why wouldn't the next adventure take us up into the sky?

Arianna, your mamma is outdoing herself again. I hope you like it as much as I do. I am really, really happy with out the phoenix turned out. I was really torn during the planning stages of the mural about what was going to go in this spot. I felt in needed to be a critter (Madeline has two dragons and a bunch of birds, after all). Going with the night theme my original thought was a owl would be appropriate. While owls are cool, I just didn't think it would be exciting enough. A mythical creature sounded like a good idea and one that glowed in some way seemed like the best option. A glowing bird with long tail feathers was the perfect fit and created a balance between the two rooms. Plus the added bonus of Aries being a fire sign.