Ella's nursery

A few months ago during winter break, I enlisted my 2 very talented cousins, Charming William and Lovely Emily, to help me paint Ella's nursery. Since this room was just recently painted with a rich dark blue hue, we didn't want to paint again. Therefore, we decided on a night forest scene with lots of birds and owls perched within trees. We then went out to search for stylized images in shops around the City that fit our vision. My initial idea is to have the images to be either simple geometric shapes or with an Anime flare.

At our first stop, SF MOMA giftshop, I found some postcards by two different artists that had many images of birds with the geometric shapes, but they weren't exactly what I was picturing in my head. The next stop was Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japantown, where we came upon a book with illustrations from a group of local artists, Gama-Go.

We purchased the book and went to town with it. First, a few illustrations that fit our theme were chosen and outlined with white color pencils.

Emily worked on the wall that is opposite the door, the main wall. The scene here is owls perched on leafless trees.


William based one of the illustrations on our beloved Sherbu.


Next, we filled in with leftover house paint, which we had a gazillion cans of. It was like working with a large coloring book!!


The entire project took about 3 days altogether. It was really quite fun. We just hope that Ella won't want to paint over all our hardwork anytime soon. Maybe when she goes to college...

Here's the finished room! We also worked Ella's name into the design, can you find it?



Her view of the room in the crib.