Since this social isolation started, two weeks in and me and Faisal were at our wit’s end…completely consumed by house chores, homeschooling, and insecurities of all kinds, I got sick and tired of being anxious. That’s when I thought of redoing one of our downstairs spare room walls where I conduct all my in-person and online workshops.

We went to one of the local wall paint retailers and bought ourselves four different shades of blue and one shade of pearl white wall emulsion. Since I mostly do canvas or furniture art, I didn’t have big rollers/trays/brushes so our next stop was the hardware store where we buy all such items. After these two stops with our facemasks and gloves on, we were back.

It took me a day to do two coats of an off-white base. I didn’t sand the previous color because it was a very light shade of cream, had it been a dark color I would have had to remove it.

It is easier to do this makeover with a helper. One will keep putting on new layers of paint and one will keep blending all the colors whichever way the fancy strikes. In our case, we blended from dark blue tones to lighter ones as we moved up from the ground. To create some texture and effect I used rags, towels, and brushes to blend and mesh the colors together. We also added hints of water-based gold paint here and there.

All in all, it took us 7 hours to complete the whole wall in addition to the basecoats.