After spending the holidays in the Bay Area, with J's very creative family (see Wertzateria), we come back to Portland determined to have a little more fun with our home's decor. Buying a Wallpaper magazine at the airport, I'm drawn to a picture of a mural in an asian restaurant. We've left a dining room wall bare since we moved into our home. We love our lighting and don't want to detract attention from that. Could a mural be the solution?

Easy for me to come up with ideas- but having an artist in the house who can actually realize them, is the best of all worlds.

Within a week, J had produced a similar design on his Mac, and after projecting the image on the wall, "we"-the Queens "we"- made a few changes in proportions. J traced out the design, and after playing around with some paint color variations, we decided on a dilution of five parts white, to one part of the existing wall color, to produce what I would call a "shadow" of the asian inspired design.

Once the design was traced and the color chosen, it took us a few easy hours of painting in the lines- and we were done. Our next project is converting one of our kids rooms into a guest room. We're looking forward to having some fun with that project as well.

More pictures of the mural process.