If you give a boy a dinosaur...

My son, Corin, has a new found affection for all things dinosaur. His idea of quiet time is turning on a Dinosaur documentary and shouting down the hall to me a play by play of who is eating whom. His original nursery for the past three years had something similar to this on the wall...

inspiration for mine based of this one from TypoDeco

A couple weeks ago Corin came home from school with a book called How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You by Jane Yolen. The books are full of these kid friendly life like cartoon dinosaurs who have taken the place of mommy and daddy's little monster angel. They are great! After reading it and a couple others that I picked up at the local library, I was informed that he wanted some in his room. Now I had been thinking that I wanted to change up the alphabet mural and decided to try my hand at painting some Dinos.

First I had to remove all the letters and patch the holes from various screws, nails, and double stick tape. My favorite is the pink to white DAP, a 1 inch putty knife, and a fine grit foam block. Then I rolled on a fresh coat of Valspar Light as a Feather in eggshell on the wall to give me a clean canvas.

Once the wall was so nice and so clean clean I plugged my laptop computer into a projector and placed the image where I wanted it on the wall.

I could only fit half the dinosaur at a time on the wall, so I traced it and then aligned the top half to what I had already drawn. They don't match perfectly because you're changing the angle of the lens, but you can fudge the connecting lines a little bit.

When you are all done you'll have a pencil line dinosaur on your wall to color in. It's like a 6 foot coloring page!! I used left over paint from other projects. The triceratops is the color of our dining room and it's stomach had some yellow from the kitchen mixed in. My husband also model paints which is handy because then I have little colors for highlighting and touching up.

I used a little artist brush to do the outline and then filled in with a 2.5 inch Purdy brush.

Here he is with his body finished, it just needs the white for his nails and horns. I waited to do the horns last, because I didn't want to get any red on the white paint. That would have taken 100000 coats of white to cover up AT LEAST. (I think we've all been there)

I used an artist brush to do some tan highlighting on the claws and horns, painted the mouth and tongue a dark red, and some dark red for defining legs/knees/arms.

Viola! There you have a dinosaur. Corin said it's a triceratops; I think it's actually a Styrocosaurus, but who cares they're probably cousins or something. There are still two more to paint, a T-Rex and some sort of pterodactyl he wants too. I'll let you know how they turn out.

On a side note, who knew that there was a P in pterodactyl?