A little birch forest

This weekend we set up the crib for the second monster who is going to join our family in two months. And while trying to find the best spot for it in the kids room, I realized how much I love this room and especially the birch trees along one of the walls that I painted last year, shortly before Yannick was born. I’ve used them as a background when photographing many of my little projetcs, but I just realized that I never published a post about these birches themselves – so let me do this now!

The first inspiration was from visiting my friend Tingting in Hamburg who has a very similar wall in her living room. At first I considered getting some wall stickers, but when I saw their price tag, I quickly decided for a small container of white paint instead. I found my personal favorite birches illustration online, then used my video projector to transfer it to the wall. In order to get straight trunks and scaling them so they would go from floor to ceiling, I had to do this in several pieces, moving and readjusting the projector each time, but that also allowed me to arrange and space the trees exactly the way I wanted to.

As I had previously done with these cloud shelves, I outlined the contures with a thin pencil line, then filled them with white paint. Applying the paint with a small paint brush resulted in a not perfectly homogenous layer of the paint – while it is thicker in some areas, the grey wall shines through in others. That effect frustrated me a little bit when painting the first few stems, but I now think that it actually adds to the overall result and mymics the typical character of real birches quite well and I’m sure wall stickers could not have done that so nicely! It was certainly not the quickest solution – I spent quite a few hours alternately on the floor and on a chair to reach for the tree tops – but I’m still just as happy with the result as I was on the first day. And what did you do during your last month of pregnancy? 😉