Castle Bedroom I: Faux Stone Walls

What child doesn't wish for a bit of magic in his life? In this three part series, paint wizards Merilee Sawusch and Tammi Latham perform their own special brand of magic when they use paint to transform an ordinary bedroom into a castle that would make even Harry Potter feel right at home.

Part I : Building the Castle - Stone Finish

To recreate the look of stone walls, surface artist Tammi Latham used Adicolor's Glacis^® glaze with MIXOL^® colorants. She tinted the glaze to create brown, umber, and mossy green glazes, rolled them randomly onto the wall with 4" fabric rollers, and bagged them with a plastic bag. Some areas were then softened with a damp rag.

After allowing the glaze to set up, Tammi "back brushed" the wall with a block brush. She explains, "You can tell if you have started doing this too soon if when you start to back brush it you get streak marks and it takes out all of the definition in the glaze. If you have hit it at the right time it will just take off the high spots and leave really cool fracture marks...like stone"

Once the finish was dry, Tammi marked out the outlines of the stone blocks with chalk and painted in the grout lines freehand. She then overglazed the entire wall using Glacis^® tinted black and dark brown, to add depth to the stone. For the final touches, Tammi shaded the individual blocks with EasyBlend and added hand painted cracks in the stone, randomly following fracture lines created by the Glacis.