I’ve recently warmed up to the idea of using stencils. To me, they always felt like ‘cheating’ a bit in the custom painting world- but the fact remains- they look amazing! Stencils afford you the ability to create just about any intricate pattern in an endless array of color combinations. However- anyone trying to sell you a stencil kit will tell you ( and show you ) how easy it is… and the OTHER fact is- it’s not!

Sure, it’s faster than hand-painting this bad boy- but stenciling requires effort to perfectly align the design both horizontally and vertically. In addition, the right amount of paint must be applied and the stencils eventually fill with paint and must be cleaned. This particular one soaked for 45 minutes and then I carefully scraped off the soft paint with a credit card for another 45 minutes. You can see in this photo below that I had to individually stencil on each ‘loop’ of this ornate dining room design. The other difficult part is the corners- often I had to hand-paint the corners to get the pattern to line up perfectly.

This next nursery project kinda plays an optical illusion on you. If you didn’t see the blue on the other walls, you’d think the blue pattern was the stencil, when in fact, it’s the white paint that was applied over top. Either way it goes, it looks great!

I really like this next pattern- the marrakech trellis. I’ve done this several times by hand, but really liked how the stencil version of this turned out as well. I used metallic silvers on a light beige paint to create the desired effect.

And finally, I had a lot of fun creating this custom design on a stairwell using a medallion stencil. I used the same stencil to create 3 distinctly different medallions and alternated the paint colors for even more of a variation. The random layout makes this pattern super fun!