What child doesn’t wish for a bit of magic in his life? In this two 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
Blending glaze with plastic bag
Adding grout lines
Overglazing
Shading with EasyBlend
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 glaze 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.
[…] easier (or just desirable) not to paint directly on the wall. When I painted the magpies for our Castle Bedroom, I was sitting at my work table, instead of up on a ladder […]