Lola’s Painted Daisy Wallpaper

I definitely blame the mom in me for it, but finishing Lola’s room first in our new home has been a big priority. While I didn’t have a big vision for what I wanted to do with each room in the house before we moved in (buying a home over Skype while in another state is not easy!), I knew I wanted to do a fun pattern in Lola’s room since I had so much fun making her a custom hand-painted wallpaper in her nursery. I’m mixing in some more ’70s decor in this house, so I thought it would be fun to do a ’70s-inspired daisy print for her walls and do a free form daisy with a big center to make it look a little pop arty as well (and I love how this artist has some sideways daisies that make them look more like fried eggs, haha). Sometimes hand-painted wallpaper can be a really big commitment, but this method of not being really precise with my shapes didn’t take that long and was pretty easy overall—and you don’t have to be an amazing artist to get it done either since the flowers are much more loosey-goosey in their shape. Here’s the basic gist of what I did …

First, I like to plan out a pattern before it goes on a wall so I have a general idea of what’s happening and where things are going. If you have Photoshop skills you can do this in a program like that to determine placement, but I just decided to print out some pictures of each wall and then draw the flowers on by hand so it would be more organic and have that not-too-perfect quality I was going for.

If you’re going to be moving around the furniture in a room quite a bit, I would space out the flowers as though the items weren’t there so you have every area covered. But Lola’s room is pretty small and there’s kind of only one option for the furniture, so I placed the flowers to work around what’s already there and didn’t feel the need to paint them behind her bed and dresser since they won’t be moved from those spots.
So, first we painted the room with a pink color to get the base for the pattern and I used ECOS Paint Strawberry Whip as the base pink color.

Next, I basically looked at my drawing for each wall and then used a smaller thinner paintbrush in the white flower color to make a quick outline of each flower. The emphasis here is that it was a “quick” outline as I wanted to keep that imperfect flower look, but you can see places where I made a flower petal bigger if I stepped back and felt a petal looked too small. Once you fill in the whole flower, you’ll go right over the smaller line, so I didn’t worry about trying to erase the smaller petal markings.

Once the outlines were in, I used a bigger brush to fill in the whole flower (with untinted white wall paint) and let the paint dry. You’ll get a different look (more or less opaque) depending on how many coats of paint you use, so if you like the more sketchy look then you may just want one or two coats of white (I ended up doing three coats). Now that we live in Pittsburgh where my parents live, my mom actually helped me fill in the flowers and it was really sweet to work on that together! She was an art teacher so she’s basically a pro at all things like this …

For painting shapes like this, I would try a soft angled 1.5″ brush to make the overall shape and then an angled 2.5″ brush to fill it in.

Once we had the white flowers filled in, I took my mustard yellow color (Mustard Glaze by Valspar) and made large imperfect circles for the centers of the daisies.

Once the centers were on the flowers, the wallpaper was complete!!
Seriously though, how sweet is that?! I love that the room has such a playful vibe and it feels like a kid’s room but not too babyish at the same time—perfect for a toddler about to become a “big girl” when she turns 4 next year. I also love how the yellow flower centers look with her new wooden bed, her velvet mustard yellow curtains (these are also great), and pops of gold on her new dresser handles I switched out recently (similar here). I also tried to pick some cute art prints that would compliment the flower pattern and this one and this one were perfect!

While it’s fun to do some projects that are super meticulous, it’s also nice to do these kind of more freeform shapes that don’t take up as much time. We still have a few more things to do in Lola’s room before it’s done, but it’s getting close and I can’t wait to see it finished! xo. Laura

P.S. If you’re looking for accent wall ideas, check out this post on when to wallpaper an accent wall!

Credits // Author and Photography: Laura Gummerman. Project Assistant: Sheila Blumer (my mom!!). Photos edited with A Color Story Desktop.