The Bee’s Knees

You should meet Christine DaSilva.  She is an extraordinary painter specializing in murals and custom wall design.  One of her latest projects was The Bee Wall as I like to call it.  Christine painstakingly taped the entire wall surface so that she could paint the bees and diagonal lines.  Of course, as can often happen, the project presented some serious challenges, one of which was the original bee stencil was the wrong scale for the client’s needs.  As Christine describes,  “. . . the stencil pattern was already laid out with bees and the trellis lines,  but the bees were too close together and didn’t line up on top of the stripes.”

For this project, Christine painted the lovely gold stripes first.  Later,  it was later decided to stencil the bees on top of the stripes.  We think it is a great look, but back to Christine’s process.  When the stencil was chosen, she first had to break it down into single bees and measure them so they were accurately spaced.   For Christine this was not the challenging part of the project.  “The challenging part [was] how to paint the straight lines without the use of the stencil itself.   Tape  was the only way [by the way, tape means placing tape on the walls in the design and spacing necessary so that only certain parts of the wall is painted],  but it needed to be placed at all the same angles and the same thickness.”

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Christine used a ruler and level in order to ensure that each and every line was the exact same thickness and angle.  She did this for all of the lines in this project.  Christine said it was the kind of project that you complete by painting line by line, bee by bee.  “In the end, you are amazed that you were able to complete and sustain high-quality throughout every detail.”

collection_photo_share_email_thumbbee” The challenge is being open-minded enough to see how problems can be solved,  but at the same time narrow-minded enough to keep focused.”

She also observed something interesting and surprising after she developed this technique:   “I was concerned that because the design was measured out and placed by hand, it might not look crisp and perfect as the pre-made stencil.  However,  the minute variations that naturally occurred with placement and line thickness actually gave the client’s wall a subtle hand-painted quality that really worked.   Better yet, she has a stencil that is completely one of a kind!”
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Christine did an incredible job!  The wall is gorgeous and our client was very happy with the end result!  I hope you enjoyed the behind-the-scenes peek at her process and the pictures.  If you have any questions about custom wall painting, murals, and other types of residential painting, please give us a call or an email.
Best,
Bill