Product Description

With the advent of laser-cut plastic stencils, home decorators and hobbyists can now find hundreds of inexpensive and easy-to-use stencils for creating stunning illusions on walls, floors and ceilings. This guide provides the instruction they need to use these stencils with skill and confidence. Step-by-step, it covers the necessary skills, tools and techniques required to create realistic visual effects in a matter of hours. After learning to combine stencils, shields and tape with simple paint techniques, readers are guided through a series of preliminary tryouts and small scale projects. Readers will learn how to: select projects to match specific rooms, buy the proper equipment; prepare surfaces, manipulate stencils, and apply paint. The final section provides more advanced instruction on layout, planning and perspective for large-scale projects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #830947 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Library Journal
From cave painting and Pompeian houses to the wallpaper scenery of a quarter-century ago, murals have come and gone from the home. These two books are evidence of a recent resurgence. Marvelous Murals is a good, straightforward manual for mountain scenes, woodlands, waterfalls, musical themes, underwater motifs, and farm scenes. Beginners will appreciate the progressive difficulty of the exercises, starting with room preparation and simple silhouettes and advancing to complex textures and perspectives. In Trompe l'Oeil Murals Using Stencils, Royals hopes to make it possible for the novice to achieve the heightened reality of the genre using the simplest of tools and methods. She begins with preliminary tryouts and small-scale projects for faux surfaces, like used brick, stone blocks, velvet drapery, and marble. Six major projects take on arched brick windows, lattice windows, limestone niches, etc. Both of these books are recommended for crafts collections. More advanced artists will also want Sarah Hocombe's challenging Fresco Painting for Home & Garden (LJ 7/99).
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Melanie Royals is an experienced professional home decorator specializing in stencils and paint effects. She designs and sells her own line of designer stencils through her company, Royal Design Studios. Since 1995, she has been the director and principle instructor at The San Diego School of Decorative Painting, and has traveled widely teaching her stenciling techniques.

Customer Reviews

A book from a Master
I believe I have about every faux finishing and stenciling book out there. I am a professional faux finisher and stenciler and so when I heard Melanie Royals put out a book in addition to her wonderful videos, I immediately bought it. It is one of the better books since she combines techniques with both stencils (windows, draperies, florals, etc.)and tape (carved wood moldings). She also includes faux finishing techniques (limestone, skyscapes, bricks) and good pro tips throughout. This is a wonderful book for the beginner since it gives clear and concise directions and for the advanced stenciller since it touches on perspective, creating multi-overlay stencils and providing project pictures to get the creative juices flowing for those of us who do this professionally. A must buy book written by a noted Master.

A great book for teaching trompe l'oeil!
There are many books out there prefessing to show the reader how to paint in the trompe l'oeil method, but few that really do the job. Most just show the completed mural and expect the reader to visualize how to paint it. Melanie's book really teaches - and in a way that's beautifully-illustrated and clearly written! She takes some difficult ideas for artists (skyscapes, perspective, shading for light source, etc.) and leads the reader through the problem to an effective solution. I loved the way she chose specific elements that many murals incorporate, making the book useful to all of us. I used her stone technique in a public library project and received rave reviews! Thank you, Melanie!

A MUST have for the serious decorative painter
After looking through it briefly in a bookstore I decided to buy. I found that on a second, more thorough reading, there are so many tips and details that only someone with a great deal of experience and artistic vision could describe. This book has it all! From very simple stenciling to the intricacies of shading, shadowing, layering, perspective, mural building and more. The step-by-step directions and project photos are are well written and invaluable, with some humor to keep it fun! My personal favorite is the faux limestone technique - who would think you could create realistic "carved stone" with stencils?! Highly recommended for the decorative artist's library!