Paint it Black

The other day I headed off to do another room at at the Ace Hotel. My friend Charles assisted me while simultaneously working on my new website’s redesign. I also asked another friend Tami,who does indie PR for me, to meet up. There we all were, full of Stumptown coffee and in Room 1105. I forgot this was one of the smaller rooms but we all found our place, Tami and Chaz in the bunk beds (yes) and me doing my thing. The wall was already painted a chalkboard matte black and so I decided to do a black gloss stencil pattern on top of this. This pattern, Birds on wires, is actually in my new book, Stencil 101 Decor. I cheated a little and had the pattern cut larger so I could work faster but the way I executed this was the same as you would with the standard sized stencil in the book. I started top left, and using the registration marks on the stencil, I created a grid on the wall using blue tape and a pencil. This went fairly fast and I worked around a door on the wall and a tv mounted as well! The reason I made the registration marks on the wall was so I wouldn’t have to paint in order. This is done so you don’t overlap your stencil on top of a wet area you just painted.  I painted the stencil with a dense foam roller, my favorite. Then there was a knock at the door. I opened the door to see this super cute gal named Valentine. She works for the Ace, blogging and holds the title “hunter/gatherer” (yes!). She took some pics and later a gentleman by the name of Jeremy visited to take more pics. We got to chatting design, and turns out he is a designer/art director for the hotel and did a vast amount of the signage and custom work I drool over  all around the hotel. I’ve mentioned this before but the attention to detail in the hotel design is just so clever. If you are a typography nut, there’s a lot to admire. They blogged about the progress on the Ace Blog. I digress… So I bounced around the wall, bent the stencil around some areas, until I covered the whole thing! The black on black gave this dramatic vintage wallpaper effect and I highly recommend it.  The photos show more contrast than in real life, it’s a subtle effect. I am dying to do more of this tone on tone effect with colors and white.  We finished the evening by me first asking Tami to hold the bunk bed ladder and walk on my back, then we walked down to Veselka for a nice warm, Polish dinner. Best Borscht in NYC!  Quite a New York day!