How to Stencil an Accent Wall, From Zig-Zags to Hearts ?

Today we have a special guest blogger, Ash from Just Measuring Up, who is a creative team of home improvement and DIY bloggers with his wife Eileen. Continue reading to find out what he has to say about using our Hearts Stencils.

Have you ever admired a stunning accent wall and wished you could recreate it?

I’ve got some good news for you! With the right stencil and perfect paint colour, it’s super simple to build a beautiful accent wall in your home, you can also get unique designs at reasonable cost with aliexpress offers. There is no requirement for creative skill.

Eileen fell in love with a heart stencil design from My Wonderful Walls and knew it would be ideal in our nursery. The new design on the wall (left over from the previous owners) begged to be modified. Eileen and I wished we had drawn over two black zig-zags with bright squares between them before moving in.

How to Decorate a Wall with a Heart Stencil ?

We normally only paint walls a solid colour, so we were excited to try something different with this one. To begin, I had to start with a blank sheet of paper. This necessitated the removal of the existing pattern. To cover the design, I used two coats of Benjamin Moore’s high-quality white paint. I had hoped that one coat would suffice, but the pattern was still clear, necessitating two coats.

However, I did have to use my orbital sander a couple of times. There were noticeable ridges in some areas of the original pattern. It was a hand-painted design with a lot of paint build-up on the zig-edges. zag’s I had hoped that the white paint would cover and conceal it, but I was disappointed with the outcome. So I simply sanded a few areas to make them smoother, then re-applied the paint.The wall soon became a blank white canvas, calling for some pink hearts to be painted on it. I read the Wonderful Walls design directions and watched their video tutorials on their website. The procedure was simple and straightforward.

The Heart Accent Wall is made of the following materials:

• My Wonderful Walls has a heart stencil design.
• Pink paint, deep and high-quality, in a quart
• Stencil brush/chalk paint
• Towels made of paper
• Painter’s sheets to cover the floor from splatters
• a blow dryer

Here’s a screenshot of my setup:

Yes, you did see a hair dryer on the list. I should’ve told Eileen that I was using hers for this project. She was perplexed as to why I had taken it. It was useful for speeding up the drying time for the templates. As a result, the prototype was sticky on one side and stuck to the wall very well. I began painting on hearts in one corner of the wall, using the template as a guide. I did my homework ahead of time and discovered that using chalk paint/stencil brushes produces some of the best results. Fortunately, Eileen had one on hand from a previous chalk paint furniture redo project.

The easiest way to spread paint with these brushes is to use a stippling technique (where you gently pat the wall with the brush repeatedly until the heart was filled in with paint, much like a woodpecker motion — pat pat pat pat).

Using a small amount of paint to form a sharp heart pattern with the template was crucial. Too much colour will bleed under the stencil, giving the hearts wavy edges. I had a couple of these hearts before I mastered my stippling technique with the proper amount of colour.

I simply tapped the brush against some paper towels after each dip to avoid getting too much paint on it. After that, I began stippling the hearts. I filled in about 3 hearts at a time on average before having to re-dip the brush.After filling in all eight hearts on the template with ink, I tapped the brush on the four registration mark holes on the template’s corners. As I progressed along the wall, these left tiny pink circles on the wall that helped me position the prototype. The registration marks were crucial in achieving a uniform heart distribution. However, the markings were just temporary. Once all of the hearts were in place, a simple dab of the original white paint will be used to erase them. I used a hair dryer on a low speed/high heat setting to speed up the drying of the paint after I finished each section. I had to wait for the paint to dry before removing the template and repositioning it for another segment.

With the hair dryer, about 10 seconds per heart seemed to be enough to cleanly extract the template.Here’s what the wall looked like after I finished the first segment (the template is at the bottom):

The hearts seemed to be in excellent condition. It was only a matter of time before the whole wall was covered in hearts.

Eileen and I were very pleased with how it worked out. We were impressed with the quality of the heart stencil, which came as no surprise given how much we enjoyed the My Wonderful Walls wall stickers we used in our son’s room. The heart stencils are ideal for a nursery for a little girl. They’d also be fantastic in a craft room. The stencil only took an afternoon to complete, aside from priming the wall from the previous pattern.

Overall, the accent wall took just a weekend to complete, and Eileen and I were kicking ourselves for taking too long to get rid of the previous pattern.

Our dog Zeus, of course, is making himself at home in our newly renovated nursery.

Who doesn’t adore those adorable hearts?! What a contrast to the zig-zags!