How to Paint Your Child's Room with Decorative Designs

One of the best ways to adorn your child's room is to paint it with a decorative design or mural. You don't have to have particular artistic skills in order to complete this project. You just need some paint, some tools, and some time.

First you'll need to decide on which pattern to create in your child's room. It's good to match colors with other items in his or her room, such as the bedspread, sheets, the bed or other furniture, a favorite stuffed animal or other prized object or toy. Even if you don't end up keeping the object you use to match your colors and patterns, it can still act as a source of inspiration. This is especially important if you're having trouble coming up with project ideas, or feel as though you're grasping at straws.

When I painted my son's room, I decided on a dark, midnight blue for the background. My husband and I taped down some drop cloths with blue painting tape, and went over the whole wall with this dark color. It's best to use washable paint for a project like this. If you've got kids, they will smear their filthy hands all over the wall repeatedly, and you don't want to have to get paint color-matched and retouch the wall every time they smear it. This is especially true if your wall has a decorative design.

I used a Sponge Prince paint sponge with a star design. This was only about $15 at the hardware store. I designed this pattern to match my son's sheets, which had a similar star design on a dark blue background.

When you're painting a decorative design on a wall, you can mix house paints the same as you would craft paints to get custom colors. However, when you mix these paints, be sure to mix enough to paint the entire project. Not mixing enough of a color will result in several different batches with different colors which don't really match properly. We chose an off-white to blue for the majority of the stars, and a pale peach color, which we had used in the kitchen, for the remainder.

Many people think that using a sponge to paint is easy; just sponge and you're done. Certainly the Sponge Prince company seems to think this. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. If you don't press hard enough, you end up with a very spongy texture to the paint, and a lot of areas where the underpainting shows through. Press too hard and you end up with a drippy mess, and an outline around the form you're trying to sponge on. The best way to handle this is to press lightly at first, then do a second pass with a paintbrush afterward to fill in any areas the sponge missed. This is a time consuming process, but not very difficult. It's best to use a fairly small brush for this, such as a watercolor brush. Don't use large house-paint brushes, sponges or rollers for this fine fill-in work.

Another important issue is getting the spacing right. One mistake many people make is simply to stamp on the sponge pattern again and again in a rhythmic pattern. This results in a redundant design which is hard on the eyes. Instead, I recommend turning the sponge at each pressing to create a different pattern. Keep moving the sponge to keep the pattern random and interesting. My sponge set came with an individual sponge which was separate from the large bulk of stars in the main sponge. This was useful for filling in odd spaces between the star clusters, to keep the pattern interesting. I used the peach color exclusively for this small star.

The result of this project was a professional-looking paint job, and a room that looks like it's lit up with stars all day long. My son was very happy with the design and so was I. To this day, this pattern spices up a room which might otherwise seem rather boring and bland, and helps to give the room its own personality. It also improves the resale value of my home. Try this project, or a similar one in your own home.