The Start of Something .......: On Safari......

Occasionally two of my grandchildren have a 'sleep over' at my house and they sleep in the spare room in a double bed, which they love, but it is not always conducive to a good night's sleep for them or us! So I decided to redecorate a bedroom especially for them.

I had several tins of leftover paint from a previous decorating project and the colour reminded me of a sandy,tropical sunset and this is really what inspired me to do a 'Safari' room.

I am incapable of drawing anything but I'm quite good at copying so I trawled the internet to find some simple black and white images of safari animals that I could adapt to fit on the walls between the ceiling and the picture rail. I found several suitable ones and decided on a zebra, a rhino and a lion.

I measured the space where I wanted to paint these animals and taped several pieces of paper together to get exactly the correct size. It took me several days to copy the images from my laptop onto the much larger pieces of paper and when I was finally satisfied with the results I cut them out to make stencils that I could draw around on the wall.

I used a combination of black acrylic paint and black felt tip pens to draw and paint the animal pictures, with extra gold felt tip on the lion and I think they look brilliant.

I then decided that one wall was going to be a real focal point and whilst trawling the net in search of safari animals I had seen lots of elephant silhouettes, which inspired me to have three elephants (one for each grandchild) walking across the wall.

Everyone needs an elephant in their room!

Three walls were already painted in the safari/sandy/sunset colour and I decided that the fourth wall would be a bluey colour with the elephants painted in black. I was going to paint a tree on this wall in the corner but by the time the elephants were done they were so big there was no room for the tree!

I already had the tall set of drawers and they were just perfect for a giraffe. Again I had to copy and adapt several pictures before I came up with the final design, which I cut up so there was a section on each drawer. I engraved the design with my dremel taking great care not to cut too deeply as the drawers are made from laminate not real wood. I was very happy with the engraving but felt that it wasn't easily noticeable so I used a felt tip pen to colour in the engraving. I am now happy with the finished result but feel that I could have achieved the same effect by just drawing the giraffe with a permanent marker, which probably would have been a lot easier!