Remember Lora’s bright and colorful kitchen? If you did a double take when you saw her hand painted Franciscan starburst style wall — you weren’t alone. Lora has kindly offered to share her easy, affordable trick for painting an entire wall with these Franciscan style atomic starbursts. With just a little bit of paint and a few other odds and ends you might already have around the house, this project can be completed in as little as two hours — how’s that for instant wallpaper.
To make the pattern, and to be loose about it in design, I took a new regular kitchen sponge and cut 3 sizes. Using the colors from the Star Burst plate, I randomly placed clustered spots. From a heavy card stock paper, I made semi triangles to simulate the the star, and with fine tip permanent pens, I drew the stars and dotted the ends…It was about 2 hours and WahLah!
After seeing the photo above, I asked Lora what the white parts on the sponge were. Her reply:
The sponge is a basic with scratch pad on the back. It’s easier to hold and the paint doesn’t go though the scratch pad!
What a great tip — and a great idea Lora.
Add texture
Lora painted her googie starbursts onto bright white wall paint. But you know, if you wanted to come even closer to replicating the actual vintage plate you could (1) match the wall color to field color of the paint and then (2) after the base color is completely dry, experiment with getting the dark gray speckles onto the wall by dipping a medium-sized paint brush into paint… blotting the brush… then kind of “whipping” or “flicking” the brush to splash the speckles onto the wall. This would take some time…Work on different non-overlapping portions of the wall as you go so that you can remove the wet speckles if they are too gloppy or whatever.
Thanks again, Lora, for sharing your secret to getting the atomic googie Franciscan style pattern up on your walls — without having to use wallpaper. This is a great budget-friendly project for anyone who has a wall that could use some atomic pizazz.