Back in December last year I set myself a list of Projects for 2010. One of them was to paint a frame, door and wall black in our living room. I’ve now done two of the three paint jobs. The frame was done a while ago. This weekend I tackled the wall.

I knew I wanted the wall to be black, but not just a plain black wall. I love the idea of gloss black on top of flat black, but what pattern? So I went looking for inspiration on wallpaper manufacturer websites and came up with this one by i.e… wallpaper:

(There are a lot of droolworthy wallpapers on that site.) I didn’t think I’d be able to match this pattern exactly, but it was about the right complexity and scale. After running the idea and a few pattern choices past Paul I did a bit of experimentation later and came up with an effect that was a mix of random and regular patterning and fairly quick and easy to do with materials I had on hand. I also decided on to paint the inside of the archway chili red (with leftover paint from our library) because we have a lot of red objects in our new kitchen.

Here’s how it turned out:

A close up:

From across the room:

Any guesses for what I used to make the pattern?