Pixelated Wall Tutorial

Painting is one of our all time favorite things to do. It can change the look of virtually anything and breathe new life into almost anything. As you probably know, we do a lot of paint projects. It’s kind of our “thing”. We just love it. This Pixelated Wall Tutorial may be one of our favorites… ever!

Today, I’m so excited to finally show you how I created this Pixelated Painterly Wall Treatment. It is pretty easy to do, but I’ll give you fair warning, it is quite time consuming.

First, I decided we wanted to do a floral image. I’m not a mural painter by any stretch so we thought it would be super fun to modernize it a bit and create a pixelated image. I ran the Mosaic filter on our floral image in Photoshop. You can do this with pretty much any image. It’s really fun!  It will also allow you to determine how large or small you want your squares during this step.

I counted the amount of squares on the pixelated image and divided it by the size of my wall. This meant my squares needed to be 2.5 inches. This was probably the hardest part of the project, figuring out how many squares and what size they should be. Let’s just say my mathematical brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. 😉

I used a laser level and a pencil to mark off my squares. Then, it was time to paint. Oh, the paint. Time to bust out your patience. Not to discourage you, of course but this is the time consuming part. I was in a time crunch to finish but if you’re not, I would suggest breaking it up into several days so you don’t get frustrated or bored.

I bought pretty much every color of acrylic craft paint at Michaels and ended up using almost all of them. I also used a ton of white to add to various colors so it gave more of a contrast where necessary.

 I hand painted, each and every square that had any color on it. I printed a copy of the pixelated image from Photoshop and taped it on the wall so I could refer to it as I went. This is where you can get creative with mixing colors. You will become a pro color mixer after this project. Seriously. When all of your squares are covered, time to add the wood!

I applied over 400 wooden blocks cut down from 1×3″ wooden boards from Home Depot to all of the white space on the wall. Since I was in a major time crunch, Savannah cut out the wood blocks (yes, in Arizona) and overnighted the box to me! That’s team work, people! 😉 I used mounting tape (also from Home Depot) and those babies were not coming off without some major muscle.  The wooden blocks are lightweight so they stuck very well!  I mixed up the direction of the wood grain for some more added interest.

That’s it! It’s pretty cool because it makes a huge impact but it’s not that difficult. As long as you have loads of patience and you’re not in too much of a hurry to get it done… like I was! Doing this project in 3 days was basically madness but it is so amazing!

Thanks to all who voted for us to WIN the paint round of Creating with the Stars! This is one of our all time favorite projects! Hope you like it!

Psst… Don’t forget to check out our other wall treatment tutorials!

DIY Gold Polka Dot Wall

How to paint stripes

DIY World Map Mural

How to paint a Chevron Wall with a pop of color