This is a record of the process I followed and lessons learned from doing a custom design and paint job for my kids' tree house. Rollover each of the images below to see a caption -- most of the images have a caption, but not all of them.
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Lessons Learned
1) Do as much of the design work (e.g. tracing, priming, painting, sanding, etc, etc) before you install it. I spent way too many hours on a small crooked ladder in the hot sun. All of the design and fabrication work could have been done in the shade on a stable surface.
2) I started the tree house before I knew what the final would look like. Not knowing what the final would be I chose to use a rough sawn particle board with grooves to give the walls architectural interest. My intent was good, but ultimately it made tracing and painting the design much harder.
3) The rough sawn wood not only made the tracing and painting harder, it also took away from the pearl and translucent effects of the top coat. I suspect the candy pearl and the ice crystal effects would have been more prominent on a smooth surface. The rough wood broke up the surface and scattered the light in too many directions.
4) I think the auto body top coat would have made a nice finished product, but since I was rolling it on a vertical surface there was no chance it would have worked for me.
5) Pink paint is expensive and hard to find. There was some Day-Glo paint on amazon I was tempted to try, but I didn't know if it would hold up to the elements. Ultimately I think artist acrylic paint with a clear polyurethane top coat would suffice. To really make the design special I would still go with the candy pearl and translucent paint pigment in a gloss clear coat. The range of colors and effects available give you the most options. Also, acrylics don't sparkle or have color change effects. The paint pigments I used were from paintwithpearl.com. They have a wide selection of products and Lyndi was very helpful when I called with a few questions.
I had a beautiful American Elm in my yard that grew too fast for its own good, and a summer thunderstorm blew it down.
So I made a tree house out of the remaining trunk
I knew the tree house needed a name, but I didn't have a plan until "Bird's Nest" popped into my head. My first design was a disaster, but it served as a starting point
This became the final design that I created in photoshop. The next challenge was figuring out how to get it on the tree house.
First thing I needed was the correct paint. I went to Home Depot with the color information and asked them to match these colors. They laughed and said that's not how it works. I did a lot of research online and it turns out there isn't a one-for-one match from digital color information to paint colors. As one friend put it, paint coloring is a bit like alchemy.
Eventually I stopped trying to get the perfect colors and took these into Home Depot and asked them to do a custom color match. Surprisingly they could match everything but the pink, which was the only real paint sample I took. The pink is called Power Pink from Montana paint and they do not make brush-on paint.
To get a pink with a vibrant pop I decided to roll my own and use paint pigments. I went with candy pearls from PaintWithPearl. Fuchsia and Blue Ghost Pearl are the ones I picked. I had never used paint pigments before so I learned a ton. The water-based polyurethane is what I used to mix it in. Deciding what to mix it in was one of the biggest challenges because of the vernacular (top coat, finish coat, base coat, binder, mixer, reducer, spray ready, etc, etc). I called PaintWithPearl and they said a polyurethane would work well for my application
I didn't want to waste my paint pigments so I experimented with some color run powder I had lying around the house. It's just corn starch and food coloring. I painted it and poured it on lots of stuff to see how it looked and how it applied/adhered. The biggest lesson I learned is that color run powder doesn't hold its color. Less than a month later most of the color had faded from everything.
I also put the color run powder in an auto-body clear coat. I quickly learned that it melts through cheap plastic. And since I was brushing it on it would require more coats than I had patience for.
Paint helpers
They regretted painting with me almost as much as I regretted letting them paint.
The blue and yellow colors were a standard semi-gloss exterior paint.
Adding the lettering was a challenge. I considered stencils, vinyl stickers, free handing it, and spray painting it. My wife suggested tracing it and my brother boasted that he could do it on the sidewalk in chalk in an hour. So I setup a practice run in the house that went well (thankfully my wife accepts me for me). And then setup a projector at night to trace it onto the tree house. Worked really well.
I knew I wouldn't have the patience to apply enough layers of the candy pearl top coat over white lettering, so I used acrylic paint first. And I tried multiple brands to see what worked best. The two above where fine, but they didn't pop as well as the Vallejo brand.
The half painted "N" was one coat of the candy pearl fuchsia. Like I said, I wouldn't have the patience to brush on enough coats.
This is after a final coat of the pink acrylic
Final coat of pink acrylic, but before the candy pearl
This is the final result after adding the two or three coats of the Fuchsia candy pearl. I also applied a coat of the blue ghost pearl over the blue and yellow portion, but there was no noticeable sparkle and seemed to mute the colors so I didn't apply additional coats.
The polyurethane mixture ran some, but it could have been avoided with more patience. I didn't care enough to do it perfectly.
Eventually I applied three coats of the blue ghost pearl over a white base. It shimmers a little in direct sunlight, but you have to be within a few feet to notice.
Close up of the blue ghost pearls pearls. This is three coats that were applied with a roller.
I painted the last wall with the fuchsia candy pearl. I think this is four coats that I rolled on.
