DIY Wallpaper with Lemon Print
DIY WALLPAPER with lemon print
A fun project to bring more joy into your home
This tutorial is meant to be a joyful project. Allow yourself to have fun – it’s not about perfection. If you look closely at what I made, it’s definitely not perfect, but it still looks very joyful :)
So again: Have fun and I’m sure you can do it!
Tools:
- A roll of paper or white wallpaper
- Paint (Acrylic paint works well or any other basic craft paint)
- Paint brushes in different sizes
- Wallpaper paste (store bought or make your own – see recipe below)
- Measuring tape
- Scissors / cutting knife
Instructions
- Measure the area you want to paper.
- Measure the paper accordingly and add 30cm/12 inch extra and cut it off.
- Get your paints ready in the right colors – You need yellow, brown, green and white.
- Follow the instruction below to paint the lemon print.
- Make your wallpaper paste if you don’t use store bought (see recipe below)
- Cut your wallpaper in pieces of about 1 meter long to make it easier to paste it, if someone else is helping you then this may be unnecessary. Do what you feel comfortable with.
- With a big brush cover the backside of the paper with the wallpaper paste – the paper will be very wet and can easily tear, so be careful in handeling it.
- Carefully place the paper on the wall, starting from one side, slowly working to the other side. You can carefully lift up the paper to adjust if necessary and use your hands to carefully smooth out the paper so no air pocket or creases appear. Remember that this is supposed to be a project that is fun as well. If something tears a bit, try to paste it back together, if there is a crease here or there don’t be disappointed. It will still look pretty good later. But while the paper is still wet you can still adjust quite a bit.
- Once the paper is dry, remove any paper that is superfluous in corners or around wall outlets. If the paper is too much stuck to remove, wet it with warm water and take it carefully off.
- Save the leftover pieces of wallpaper to use as wrapping paper for gifts.
Make your own wallpaper paste:
You need:
- 1/4 cup cornstarch
- 3 1/2 cups warm/hot tab water
- A pan that easily fits 1 liter of liquid.
Take the cornstarch and sif it into the pan. Add a little bit of the warm water and mix well with a whisk. Try to whisk all the lumps smooth, add more and more water and keep whisking well.
Bring the mixture to a boil, while constantly mixing, you will see it will get slightly thicker and turns transparant. I let it boil for a couple of minutes while whisking. Let the mixture cool off to room temperature. Store in in an air-tight container if you’re not using it right away – it will be usable for one to two weeks.
The painting process
Below you can find the painting process for the lemons, the twigs and the leaves.
The lemons / See slider below for examples
- Paint with yellow many lemon shapes. try to keep them around the same size
- Take some white paint and add a bit of your yellow color and mix. Add that to one side of each lemon shape. It’s best to choose a point where the light is coming from, this makes it easier to know where light and dark falls. I chose the right upper corner as the point where the light comes from.
- Take some of your yellow paint and add a bit of brown paint to it and mix. Add this to the opposite side of the light part of the lemons.
- Take some pure white and add that on top of the lighter part of the lemon.
- Take some brown paint with a little yellow added to it and add that on top of the darker spot of the lemons.
The brown twigs
Take a small brush and some brown paint. Add a bit of water to the paint so it flows easier. Make stripes from the top to the bottom and try to attach as many lemons to it is as possible. Some lemons will hang from a side twig, so add some side twigs to the main ones.
The leaves
- Make sure you have a good color of green. Green is not always the right shade from the paint bottle. If the green is a very harsh green, add yellow and/or white until it becomes a more natural tint that you like.
- Paint one or two leaves where the lemon meets the twig. And add more leaves to the side twigs.
- Here we work in the same way of shading as the lemons. So take some white paint and add your green to it and use it to highlight the leaf from the same light source as before. After that add some pure white paint on top of that.
For the shade take some green paint and add some brown to it to make the darker part of the leaf, and after that put a little bit of pure brown paint on each shadow.
