I am always looking for quick and easy ways to transform my room and painting so often seems the best and easiest way forward. However, my room is quite dark and the white walls really help to make it feel light and fresh, so painting them a different colour just wasn’t the answer. Dilemma! How could I keep my walls sparkling white but give my room the revamp that it so desperately needed? Inspiration came to me when, as I was pondering my dilemma, I looked down and saw that I was wearing a top covered in irregular dots. This is my absolute favourite pattern at the moment and I suddenly thought why not transfer it onto my wall? It was just the inspiration I was looking for and has led me to this DIY, which I can’t wait to share with you. So without further ado let’s get painting, or should that be stamping…
First of all you need to create a few different shape and sizes of dots to print onto your wall, like stamps. Decide on your sizes and draw the outlines onto some thick cardboard (more like a cardboard box than a cereal packet). Then cut them out and this will give you your stamp. Or alternatively, you can use lino printing equipment, which is what I did – you can pick the kits up online fairly cheaply. To create your ‘stamp’ this way, again, decide on your shape and draw it onto your lino. Then carefully(!) use the cutting tool to cut around the shape and hey presto you have your dot stamp ready for the next step. Either way is a good way to create your stamp, I would say the lino stamps are more hardwearing, so if you are looking to do a larger wall this may be a better option for you.
Next what you need to do is do a quick test that your stamp actually works and that you are happy with the shape. I found that the stamps I created gave a great overall shape but I needed to just fill them in with a bit of extra paint after I stamped them, as my dots had a few white areas. So don’t worry if this happens to you! And it only takes an extra five minutes to fill in the little gaps so don’t let it put you off. This DIY is a really quick and easy way to refresh a room and give it a bit of a personal touch.
Now, bring on the wall! For this I used black acrylic paint but you could equally go and buy a tester of black wall paint and use that. Get your chosen paint and paint it onto your stamp before stamping it onto the wall. You may need to fill in a few little gaps in your dots with a paintbrush at the end, but don’t worry about this too much for now. However, before you begin there are a few things that you should think about, one of the most important of these being the overall look that you are going for. I decided to place my dots randomly but you could equally place them more neatly at regular intervals and you can have as many or as few dots as you want, it really is up to you.
If you are going to do irregular dots, as I did, my top tip would be to ‘work’ the whole wall. By this I mean don’t start doing all your dots at the bottom of the all and then step back only to realise that they don’t quite match the top. Dot here, there and everywhere – it will definitely look more natural. Also place a few dots next to each other every now & then, they will end up looking very un-random if they are all equally spaced. Now you really can get stamping, go wild & create the dotty wall of your dreams!
And that really is it! I hope you will all love your new walls as much as I love mine. I think it is at the perfect way to reinvent a white wall and this literally took me an hour and a half (including making the stamps). If you are sitting there thinking how will I ever find the time to do this, or can I be bothered to make the stamps myself, Etsy has come to your rescue as loads of people sell irregular dot wall decals that you just peel and stick. Definitely worth checking out! If you give it a go, either with stamps or decals, feel free to send me your pictures, I’d love to see the finished makeovers.
Love Holly x