Phineas and Ferb Bedroom Mural - You Can Do This Too!

I have been working on my little guys bedroom since June 2012, and it is finally starting to take shape. I am one of those decorators that likes to live in the space and decide what it really needs to make it pop. No, I don't live in my son's bedroom, but I do go and sit in it for awhile, look around and think about what to do next.

In our last house, the little guy never had a color paint on his walls. The room was still the same builder base white when we moved out. So I promised him that with this new house, his room would be the first to be painted. And with the help of a bunch of teenagers (that are always around so I put them to work) his room got painted first. He choose a theme of Phineas and Ferb. If you don't know who they are, you can see their picture here, and a short video of them here. It is a super cute and creative cartoon from Disney Channel.

So he wanted his walls to be "Agent P" teal. We took his Perry the Platypus stuffed animal to Menard's and matched it up with a color swatch the best we could. The entire room was painted in this bright teal color. The inside of his closet was painted with a leftover pail of orange. Why orange? Well Perry's bill, feet and tail are orange, so the closet represents the second color that he sports.

So with plain teal walls it didn't look enough like Phineas and Ferb to me. So I sat in his room and thought about it for awhile. I considered painting the words to the theme song (There's a 104 days of summer vacation...) in a gloss paint the same color. That way it would just be shimmer words that you really had to look for to notice them. But I decided against that. And then I got a new job...at a University...they had LCD projectors that I could borrow for a weekend! I decided to do the characters hand-painted all over his walls. I ended up penciling the outlines of Phineas, Ferb, Candice, Baljeet (my favorite character) and Agent P parachuting into the room. And then they sat.

He lived with pencil drawings on his walls for a few months while I kept looking at them and deciding if this was the direction I wanted to go in. Well when we rearranged his bedroom and I looked around, I liked the feel of it, so off to Michael's I went with a picture on my phone to get all the different paint colors needed. It is amazing how many different colors are in a few cartoon characters. We ended up having to buy 19 different colors at $.50 each and some new fresh paint brushes. So realistically this whole project only cost $20 and lots of painting and drying time. That is a money saver to decorate a bedroom easily. And when he grows tired of it, you just paint over it!

So color by color I started painting the characters. I didn't take the time to think about which colors I should have used first, and that might have helped in the long run. I just started with the color that most of the characters had in them first. If I do another round of characters (to include Dr. Doofenshmirtz, Isabella, and Buford) I will pay attention to what colors should be underneath and paint those first and do the details over them. Otherwise it is just a huge game of paint by numbers. Look at your picture that you used to trace the pencil lines, and match up the colors to make it look the same. Because I was painting over a colored wall, I did two coats of each color to make the paint color look richer. The orange could have even used a few more. I also had cramps in my thighs for a few days afterwards due to squatting to paint a few of them! It took me two days to paint them all up, one day to have them dry completely and one day to outline and add features with a black sharpie marker. After the first day of painting, all the characters looked like they were zombies because none of them had pupils in their eyes yet. I thought that was one of the funniest parts of painting them.

Here is how they ended up looking when all finished. I really am quite proud of my self (slap on back). I think they turned out great, and so does the little guy which is what really matter in the long run. The older kids, their friends and hubby all like how they turned out too. I never would have been able to draw these free hand, but just filling in the spaces with colors...anybody can do that.

What's left for this room? There are a few more projects that need to be completed before I consider this room done. My list includes: more mural characters,  room darkening curtains behind his Phineas and Ferb curtains, a valance, a new lighting fixture or maybe ceiling fan, and either a new door, or painting the door. He also needs new carpet, but that will have to wait until the whole upstairs gets recarpeted. There will always be smaller projects too, but I will tackle those when they come up. As of right now, he is happy with his room, so I am too.

I am sharing this post with:


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