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Alice on my Wall
I finally got around to painting Alice and the Cheshire Cat on my wall:
It was really easy, it just took a few steps. Here’s how:
Photoshop your image down to basic lines
- Get a hip image, open it in Photoshop, and trim out all the junk until you’re down to just the part you want as the basis of your stencil (use the eraser or the select tool). I wound up cutting all the leaves out of mine to keep it clean.
- Crank the contrast way up and adjust the brightness if you need (image > adjust > brightness/contrast)
- Use a gaussian blur to reduce the detail (filter > blur > gaussian blur); you might have to play with how strong you want it; I think I had mine set at 5.6. For this step and the next the image size actually matters though, because they operate in absolute pixels rather than a relative scale.
- Do a cutout to get the stencil look (filters > artistic > cutout); use 2 for the number of levels and play with the other two settings to get the level of detail you want. Because mine was so big, I used the lowest setting for ‘edge simplicity’ and the highest for ‘edge fidelity’.
- If you need to run brightness/contrast again to get back to a simple black-and-white, do so. You might also want to invert the black and white of the image (image > adjust > invert) to make the next step easier, depending on your wall color.
- If you need to do any touch-up (like my cheshire cat’s right eye, for example), you can either do it here or on the wall, depending on your free-hand skills.
Project, trace, and paint the image- Project the image onto the wall. Be careful of the angle at which you project; if you don’t have enough room to project perfectly straight on (I mean really, some of us live in small nyc apartments) and your projector doesn’t have keystoning or ratio controls, you may want to adjust the image dimensions in photoshop first (edit > transform > perspective) to make sure that whatever angle you do project from doesn’t change the way the image looks on the wall. Note that mine wound up a little fat; I had to project from the diagonal corner of my room and I keystoned the image, but didn’t realize how much wider my projection was than my original.
- Trace an outline of the image onto the wall. Just use a pencil, and just do your best to trace in line with where you’re actually going to want to paint so you don’t have pencil marks all over.
- Paint! It doesn’t need to be perfect, and you can always make adjustments later. I don’t recommend using two highly contrasting colors unless you’re a really good painter; if you paint light-on-dark you may need two coats (what a pain!) and if you paint dark-on-light it will be hard to “erase” by painting the wall color over any screw-ups you make in the image.
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