We have this small squarish hallway leading to Jarrod’s Office, my Art Studio and the main floor bathroom. Oh, also a linen closet. I really wanted to do the entire hallway in googly eyes (shhh …. it’s okay) and started it. However, it proved to be incredibly time consuming to do each set of eyes differently and I quickly abandoned the project and fretted about how I should move forward. It sat like this for about a year:

Screen Shot 2020-01-16 at 5.08.25 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-01-16 at 5.08.51 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-01-16 at 5.09.05 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-01-16 at 5.08.08 PM.png

Here’s Googly and I posing for an instagram post (showing off a t-shirt I designed) , before I betrayed and destroyed him.

While I took my time deciding if I should really spend hours upon hours painting each individual set of eyes, I turned around to the opposite wall on an ADHD whim and started this lightning/cloud pattern:

Here it is, unfinished, much like most of the projects in my life. I actually really liked where this was going and considered just taking it all the way around. In the end, I decided to just start over. (I will probably use this pattern elsewhere in the house.)

So I painted over everything with the same deep plum color and this time covered the baseboards and door frame. While I was painting I was trying to figure out what I wanted to paint on the walls. I thought about doing the googly eye thing (my family is apparently sad that I painted over it) in a simpler pattern, or actually giving them faces.

I got my iPad out to do some rough sketches:

I really just felt like this was not the place for the googly eye wall. Images of Tigers kept coming to me, so after about 18 attempts at drawing a tiger (It’s so funny, as an artist you get really good at drawing/painting certain things/people/places etc, so when I tried to draw a tiger, which I never draw, it was so….bad.) I finally got a reference photo and did a quick outline then filled in the rest myself. ( OOF! I’m definitely going to start branching out on my skills here. )

Anyways, I know, shut up already, right?

So I ended up with this:

This is the first time I’ll be making my own stencil, and I’m nervous. Also, will I regret this? I think I’ll make them really big so I’m not spending 6 months doing that much detail on each tiger. Also, the colors will be more muted than what’s on the digital version. Also, stay tuned!