The Painted Crown

Taylor is a princess! She'd been wanting more things that were "princessey" (is that a word?) to decorate her room, so a crown above her bed seemed to be just the thing.

First, I went the route of those metal canopy things that the green checkered fabric (you can see it above) would hang from. Then I saw the price of those things in the children/home decor boutiques! My stars, those suckers are expensive! Seriously, I don't think I saw one cheaper than $300!

Above her headboard were the words "follow your dreams" that I cut out on my Cricut machine. It was cute, but the pink on her apple green walls became a shocking pink and I was never really happy with it. So, since the crown canopy thing was out, I decided to take down the vinyl letters and paint a crown.

(I'm going to take a break now and apologize for the photos. We've got a sunscreen on Taylor's window so it's always a bit dark since it faces North. It's screwed on, or I would have taken it off for the photos. Though they don't look it, her walls are a light green color. Continuing on...)

I love the way it turned out:



Want to make one yourself? You can! (Really, it just takes a bit of time). There are two ways to go about it. The first is to free-hand draw the crown on the wall.

You're freaking out now, aren't you?

That's what I did, but I totally get that not every one can do that. If you are one of those people, you'll need an overhead machine. I think that you can check those out from the library.

You'll trace the outline of the crown (or draw it for those of you artsy fartsy types) on the wall using chalk. Why chalk? Because if you mess up, it's really easy to remove it without a trace. Just make sure that you work from left to right if you are right handed, or from right to left if you are left handed, so you don't smudge what you drew.


Once you've got the chalk outline the way you like you can outline it with paint. I love those little paint sample cans that stores are offering now. You know, the tiny one's that let you try the paint on the wall before you buy it. Those little cans of paint are perfect for projects like this!

Don't worry if you can still see a bit of the chalk outline after you've outlined it with paint. Once the whole thing is done and dry, you can use a damp cloth to remove any chalk remnants.


As you're tracing the chalk outline with the paint, you should have something that looks like what is in the photos.

This is what it will look like when it's completely outlined with the paint:

Once you've got it outlined, fill it in!

If you are feeling particularly creative, you can use paint to give it dimension. How, you say? You'll need 2 colors - a light color and a dark color. You can use white and brown (or black), or you can use two different shades of the color you made the main crown in. Since my crown was pink, I used a light pink (it was almost white), and a mauve color.

The general rule of thumb is that if the sun was shining on it, you'll add the light color to the areas that the sun would touch. You'll add the darker color to areas where there would be a shadow.

Confused? You'll add the light color to the top parts, dark colors to the bottom.

You can see how I added the light and dark colors in the photo below.

Since it's a crown, and crowns should have jewels, I used a regular hot glue gun to attach rhinestones to the crown. I'm thinking now it needs more because you can never have too much bling, right? :)

I think I might add Taylor's name in the main section of the crown, too. What do you think?