Back to painting that rock wall! The paint is dry and finished. Here’s the final look before the holds go on.
As mentioned last week, I wanted to use neutral colors to give it a natural outdoorsy-rock-alpine feel. I found the most amazing green in the Home Depot Clearance paint that changed my direction from all-beige to ‘I must-have-this-green.’ The grey and beige blocking was a home-mix using a combination of clearance and oopsie baby-blue, white, fuchsia, a tiny thing of gray, plus more green.
I did sketch the design out in my sketchbook before putting brush to wall, and I also used a color-mixing tool online to maximize my formula of clearance and secondhand paint. This helped me produce as little waste as possible and work efficiently.
We wanted the walls to be textured (like a rock, or a climbing wall), so I also came home with a bag of sandbox sand to mix into my paint! It was a fine balance between not-enough-sand and I can-barely-spread-this, but it worked beautifully in different ratios per coat of paint. Frequent mixing was key to keep the sand well suspended in the paint, so I worked in small-batches, keeping a pair of chopsticks handy for regular agitation. The end result is a thicker coating of paint with a lot of satisfying grit.
The final step after the big color blocking was to add the decorative linework, which to me, adds all of the movement and visual rhythm to the wall. Now it looks like a cave that I want to hang out in!
