Painting the Dog Silhouettes

I had so much fun making Beatrice and Arthur's dog silhouette mural and it was also a very easy, inexpensive way to decorate their room - the whole thing took only four hours and cost less than $10.

After spending so much time painting and repairing the walls in this room I was a little hesitant to alter them, so I decided to paint on the back of the door. It's a cheap hollow-core door that we'll eventually want to replace with a nice hardwood door anyway, ideally just around the time the kids outgrow the mural.

I started by standing each dog in front of a blank white wall and taking their photograph in profile. This was, no joke, the hardest part of the whole thing. Cromwell, in particular, would not sit still, and it was nearly impossible to get a profile photo of Shackleton because he kept turning to look at the camera. Finally, finally, I got some photos I could use.

Shackleton posing for his portrait

Then I used GIMP (an open-source version of Photoshop) to reduce them to outlines.

Shackleton in outline

If you were better at freehand drawing on a computer than I am, you could then trace the outlines digitially using the pen tool, but I'm terrible at drawing with a mouse so I printed these out and traced them with a Sharpie.


Then I rotated them and touched them up a bit in GIMP and they were ready to go*.

I set up a digital projecter in the kids' room and projected the images onto the door.


I traced around the projected images in pencil.

Then it was just a matter of carefully filling them in with paint in Behr's Crisp Green and Electric Orange**.

After driving myself insane trying to get rid of all the visible brushstrokes left over from the combination of three different brushes and a roller, I told myself that the brushstrokes were an "effect" that gave the mural more "depth and dimension."

Conveniently, Beatrice was out of town for the weekend so I could do all the drawing and painting while she was gone and surprise her with her very own dog portrait when she got back.

*We made Cromwell bigger than life-size because Dev thought it looked better that way, and we actually made him less fluffy than he is in real life because his ultra-fluffy outline looked sort of fake.

**On the same paint chip card as Crisp Green there is also "Carolina Parakeet."