Animal Prints

I just love the way Tammi Latham, owner of Matilda Jane Originals found such creative uses for this leopard stencil from the Stencil Library!

I had a zillion questions for Tammi about how she did this room, and she was very happy to provide some answers. Tammi reports that she used contrasting shades of brown for the background…one darker, one lighter…almost tan color. Starting in the center of the room, she painted vertically, alternating colors to simulate the background of the fur…not making it too “stripey”, but blending softly between colors. Each section of color is approximately 1 foot wide. She let this base dry completely before using the very large, leopard print stencil. Using stencil adhesive to adhere the stencil to the wall, and armed with a large, 5″ stencil brush, she stenciled over the blended base “stripes”. Tammi varied the depth of color on the spots, so there would be light and dark areas. For this bathroom, Tammi started the leopard print in the corner and worked around the room. Lastly, the bottom portion of the walls were painted with a metallic bronze and a hand painted “fur” border was added.

For another job, Tammi used the same leopard stencil for a background to display her clients’ photos in a hallway. Here, she started on the left side with her stenciling process. She hand painted a faux bamboo frame.

Great job, Tammi! My eyes would surely be crossed at the end of a day of stenciling all of these spots!

Recently, I had the opportunity to create a Snake Skin finish for one of my clients. Now, I am absolutely petrified of snakes… can barely even look at a photo of one, so the snake skin finish I did was metallic silver. I did this finish on a beverage refrigerator for a client. You can see more pics and read about it here.

At first I thought I would purchase a snake skin stencil for this project, so I did a little research. I will warn you right here and now, that I certainly will be promoting the use of Julie’s wonderful website, stencilsearch.com. This is a site I have been using for years and find invaluable. So, my first stop was right over to that site, typing in the keywords “snake skin“. Lo and behold, some options appeared. One stencil was too expensive for this project and another was not quite what I was looking for.

Next, I decided to check out what others were doing for Snake Skin Finishes and did a Google search. Try that Google search and you will see quite a variety of Snake Skin finishes created on just about everything! A great find for me, when I did this search, was to run across decorative painter, Regina Garay’s blog. Regina and her crew recently did a much more elaborate snake skin project, which she features on her blog. Regina’s work is amazing and I have added her to my blogroll!