Walls that move you

From the Resene colour inspiration – latest looks gallery

Adding a dynamic pattern to a space can be a great way to bring movement and interest to it.

Depending on the colours and the busyness of the design you incorporate, movement can either inject energy into the room or create a sense of balance and harmony in it. While there are plenty of interesting patterns in the Resene Wallpaper Collection to choose from, another idea is to paint a design on your walls, floor, ceiling or a piece of furniture. The strategy allows you to completely customise the size, shape, scale, colours and form and create a look that’s entirely unique to you and your space.

The painted herringbone design in this bedroom, with its embedded arrows, pushes the eye back and forth across the room, forcing it to take in all the details. But because it is made up of gentle tonal blues, the pattern doesn’t overwhelm. Instead, it sets the tone for the colour scheme used throughout the rest of the space so that it all hangs together cohesively. The best part is, it’s simple to create using high-quality painter’s masking tape, a pencil, ruler and level. But remember, no matter how simple or complex a design you wish to paint, it’s always wise to plan out your design first on paper before you take it to your surface.

Although it may appear at first glance that this design is made up of four or five colours, there are only two accent colours – Resene Duck Egg Blue and Resene Inside Back – used on top of the two basecoats in Resene Half Duck Egg Blue. It’s the use of negative space that creates this optical illusion. Once our basecoats in Resene Half Duck Egg Blue were completely dry, we measured and marked our wall vertically in 30cm increments working from floor to ceiling. Then, we used a level and a pencil to draw straight horizontal lines across the wall. These pencil lines serve as a guide for when you apply your masking tape to ensure you get a straight, level line once it’s removed. We then marked 15cm increments across our horizontal lines to make it easy to connect them at 45 degrees and 135 degrees. We used 24mm wide professional quality washi-style tape, available at your local Resene ColorShop, throughout our design – which, when applied firmly, provides crisp clean lines for the finished design. Once our first diagonal strips of tape were applied, we measured 24mm gaps on either side before applying subsequent strips of tape. Once the entire design had been masked off, we applied our accent colours at random in two coats, skipping occasional gaps. After our paint had dried to the touch, we removed all the tape and used a rubber eraser to remove what remained of our pencil markings.

In order to bring the colours in our design off the wall and into the greater space, we used Resene testpots in Resene Duck Egg Blue and Resene Inside Back to paint a few plant pots, vases and other small accessories. However, a bedroom that looks too ‘perfect’ or ‘matchy matchy’ may not feel like a relaxing one to spend time in. The key to making the space more liveable is to bring in a few elements that will serve as points of difference to balance the effect of your matching accent colours. An easy way to achieve this is to stick within a similar realm of blue and grey tones but look to versions of these hues that contrast sharply with the others already in the space. Since our painted wall design has been created with a selection of mid-range blues, bringing in a touch of deeper navy, steel blue and blackened blue such as Resene Warrior, Resene Dark Slate and Resene Jaguar as well as lighter Resene Half Sea Fog can help break things up. Try one or two on a plant pot, another on a bedside lamp and the final hue as part of a piece of DIY artwork created with Resene testpots. And if it’s a casual look you’re after, you can’t go wrong with timber flooring finished in Resene Colorwood Mid Greywash, which lends a soft beachy vibe to ground the space.

Project by Laura Lynn Johnston. Photography by Bryce Carleton. 2022