DIY Batman Cityscape Bedroom

This is one of the most important

painting blog posts I have ever done... 

 Not because I'm in love with Batman, but because Batman took up a serious amount of time away from the people I do love.  It's all good though, because this was for my little super hero and his room.

   

You see, I started this project almost exactly a year ago (thank you Timehop) and it has been staring me down ever since.   With probably a total of 40 hours of work, it has been the most time consuming painting project by far.  It's not too complicated - you just need to bring a little bit of patience along with these...

Paint

I used black and then a custom yellow and blue mixed to match my son's bedding.

Tape

I went through almost 4 rolls of this stuff.  You'll see why in a minute. This was my first run to the store to get more. I was excited and ready to keep working!

Now that we've covered our supplies, let's get started.

First, I taped of the baseboards and trim around the doors and window. I like to get that out of the way in the very beginning, otherwise it seems to interrupt my flow.

Next up - the paint. I wanted the city to have a dark feel to it, so I picked a darker turquoise/blue for the sky and painted that as my base. Yes, I did the ceiling too.

Did you notice the paint doesn't go all the way to the baseboard? That's because the city buildings will take up some of that space so it can be left alone for now.  :)

Once the paint was dry (2 coats using the Valspar paint+primer), I mixed the left over paint in the pan with a bit of white and painted some clouds with a medium brush.  You will see this better in some of the later pics.

(Sorry if the lighting varies in these pics.  I did not use any photo edits since I want to show the true colors, but the big window in Carson's room made some of the pictures hard to capture.) 

Once the sky was completed on the ceiling and walls, I started taping off my buildings.  As mentioned in my previous posts, I'm not much of a planner so I really didn't know where the buildings would go until I started taping. (Side note: I did grab a level for this part.)  

I don't think there is a "right" way for this stuff. :) I made some tiered and gave some towers and antennas. 

And then I started filling in the buildings with the black paint.

As you can see in the pic above, some of these buildings were pretty tall. (see the ceiling right there near the top of that one?)  I wanted him to feel like he was surrounded and part of the city.

Once the buildings were dry, it was time to tape off the windows.  This.  Takes.  Time.

I wanted the windows to be yellow and a bit random to suggest people might still be in the office and such at that time of day. This gives the look of life in the city, but you still get the evening effect.

So, I started painting the yellow windows...

The windows took 3 coats - yellow over black says it all. 

One of my favorite parts is taking the tape off of the wall.  I try to wait until the paint is dry, but sometimes I'm just too excited! Here is the city after the tape is gone.

Deep breath.  

What a great feeling being surrounded by these walls!

Now to put the furniture back...

And we mustn't forget the Batman accessories-

a batman nightlight (not shown) and batman wall decals.

 

I had some fun and created a few little batman scenes on the buildings. 

The nice thing about adding the removable Batman stickers is the room doesn't necessarily have to be a Batman theme as he gets older.  I see Batman coming down, and visions of a city full of graffiti in the future. Ha!

So there you have it - the tutorial on how I painted my son's Batman cityscape bedroom.  

There's still one pretty big thing missing.. can you guess what it is?  We still need to add the Batman signal in the sky.  I have some ideas with a light, but there is always the option of painting that as well.  I guess I will save that for another post. :)

-Stacey