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Can I paint walls inside instead of wallpaper


ShazNZ

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Mixing flat white with acrylic is an interesting thought - I didn’t know you could do that. I can get the Americana deco art here if that works. And I will hunt in Johannesburg for a hardware that does samples. 

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8 hours ago, Fkendall said:

How far would one of those Americanas go? If I can find samples of house paint I’ll probably use eggshell. 

2-oz. does a medium-sized room. You can get them in 16-oz. as well but that goes pretty far. 16 ounces is a pint. I did the entire exterior of a Southwestern adobe with one 16 oz. and had a bit left over. I'd say the size of that house was about the equivalent of cutting a Thornhill in half.

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8 hours ago, Fkendall said:

Mixing flat white with acrylic is an interesting thought - I didn’t know you could do that. I can get the Americana deco art here if that works. And I will hunt in Johannesburg for a hardware that does samples. 

Just be aware that using it to tint white paint is going to change the color entirely. Red will become pink. I prefer to use them as Holly does, directly from the tube. I have mixed those together, however. I wanted a green to be a bit more grayed. It worked so well I got exactly the color I was going for.

They're great for doing washes too. I used sienna and burnt umber on a weathered old farmhouse and I was thrilled with the result. When I suggested a wash for your shingles, this was exactly the paint I had in mind. It's what I used on my own aged cedar shingles on the side of a New England colonial. I'll be doing it again on my Dutch gambrel.

I must have 50 different tubes of this stuff. I put dabs of various colors onto a palette when doing bricks for instance, and then just willy-nilly start dry-brushing colors onto random bricks. If the dabs all start to get mixed up, so much the better; it gives nice shading variations to the final product. Anyway, point being it's a versatile paint and is my go-to for a variety of uses.

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9 hours ago, Fkendall said:

I will probably  paint almost every room a different color, or wallpaper, I like colored rooms.

May I make one more suggestion? I love color too but you need to treat a dollhouse differently than a real house. With a dollhouse, you see all the rooms at once. Try to keep a similar tone in each room. I don't mean every room a similar color, but if you do bright historic colors in one room and then a muddy Victorian color in a room right above that one, and then pastel in the one next to it, well, EEK, that would be a hot mess.

A good example is that red and green together can look like Christmas. If you did a rich garnet red in a dining room, however, you could have a deep emerald green in a library next to it, and a dark sapphire blue parlor next to that. It sounds like one would have way too many colors going on, but the similar tone - in this case jewel tones - makes them work beautifully together.

It works for all decorating themes. Victorian colors were all muddy and far from jewel-toned: mustard yellow, sage green, terracotta orange. They're all similar tonal values. Federals, Georgians and Colonials had surprisingly bright colors, and they mixed lemon yellow in one room, Kelly green in another, peacock blue somewhere else. All sunny, bright colors (to counteract gloomy English and New England skies!) which even when seen all at once in a dollhouse look good together.

Here's an example I thought was very well done. Green, blue, yellow, peach, pink all seen at once, but the similar soft tonal values make it look cohesive.

Color Variations.jpg

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Thanks Kelly and Holly for all the useful advice. I will keep the tonal values and seeing everything at once in mind and go for the Americana rather than house paints. There is a sale in the main art & craft shop here in August so I can stock up.  Exciting!

I plan to paint the outside a sunny yellow with a matte acrylic and will go from there. 

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