ORC Bonus Post

#ORC Week 4-5 Dreamy Cloud Ceiling

One of the touches I've been dying to add to this room is a dreamy sky blue ceiling with clouds. This is something my mom added for me when I was in high school and I LOVED it!!

It was so amazing to wake up to every morning and fall asleep to every night. I loved staring at the different clouds and allowing my brain to relax and fall asleep. Come morning time, it was such a gentle way to ease back into the world from dream land.

I want the same experience for my boys so I plan on incorporating this technique in some way in each of their rooms, and honestly will probably do it in our space somewhere too. Jaxson was first up, so I went with a sky blue paint by Behr and used our paint sprayer to apply it to our ceiling. You can check out our other blogs, ORC Spring 2023 Week 1! and ORC Spring 2023 Week 3 & 4! on skim coating, priming, and painting for exactly how we did all of this in preparation for the ceiling.

When spraying the ceiling, I wasn't overly concerned about getting an even coat over the primer. I wanted an ethereal look so I was taking advantage of the sprayer leaving some faint gaps that gave a wispy look, particularly at the edges of the room. I could always choose to fill these in with white paint later or come back over the areas with blue paint.

When it was finally time to paint the clouds, we had to pick our colors. Not every cloud is white, particularly here in Colorado, so we had to add some accents. For the room, I wanted to bring in some yellow and pinky-orange tones that could be repeated with textiles and other accents throughout the room as we finished this nursery. In the past, I've done yellow and a pale pink, you could do purple and blue tones....the sky is the limit--pun very much intended!

To make this fun, I dressed up as Bob Ross and made a reel about how to do clouds, which you can check out here. The key to clouds is blending, having patience, and blending some more. Generally, you start with a white cloud base in whatever general shape you want (i.e. fluffy, linear, wispy, etc). Once you have your base shape, it's key to use a dry brush to start "fluffing" it or "wisping" it out. The dry brush will carry the wet paint out on the edges and give the translucent cloud-like appearance at the edges.

Once you have your general shape and base ready, you can add an accent color to bring in depth. Adding pinks and yellows gives it that sunrise and sunset color appearance that really make the clouds pop. When you do this, be consistent about where you are putting your accents. At the top, at the bottom, wherever. This makes it easier to tell where "the light" creating your color accents is coming from and makes it seem more realistic as opposed to random splashes of color.

Once you have your color highlights on the cloud, use your dry brush to blend them into the cloud so it doesn't look like color streaks. Blending will dilute some of the color and mix it into the cloud based color more evenly. If the dry brush isn't blending it enough, or you feel like the color is too vibrant, you can always add a little of your cloud base color over the color streak and blend that together to lighten.

As you play around with this, you'll get a feel for your paint and your brushes and how well it blends together. Once you're warmed up, you'll want to paint clouds everywhere. Feel free to play with different sizes and shapes as you move around the room. Play with clouds overlapping each other just like they do in the sky.

Overall, just have fun with it! What's the worst that could happen? You don't like it? It's paint, you can always paint it back to sky blue and start over.

Have fun channeling your inner Bob Ross and go paint some clouds on your ceiling to wake up to each morning!

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