Painting with Stencils: The Floor Edition

The 6th Wall…The Floor

Paint doesn’t just belong on walls and ceilings. Painting floors is a unique way to bring style to your space without a lot of work or time. We trash our studio floors pretty good with all of the painting and plaster plops falling off the trowel in class. From time to time, we like to spruce things up around here to keep it fresh and inviting. We decided to makeover our floors with SetCoat® and some stencils.

I’m a big fan of circular or symmetrical stencils for this application because there is freedom in placement. But a continuous or allover stencil would be equally beautiful. There are so many great stencil options out there…Google your heart out. We got a few different styles and sizes of the stencils and just picked some fun and modern colors of SetCoat®. Read about the reason we use SetCoat®.

Use a Foam Roller

The key to painting with stencils is painting over them, using a foam roller—the key is low nap, or essentially no nap with the foam roller. You also want to “offload” the excess paint before you paint over the stencil to prevent any under-bleeding of paint. We did this over rosin paper, or you could use paper towels. This will help give you cleaner, crisper lines on your design and avoid any possible touch-ups. Less is more in this case. It’s always easier to add more color than to take away.

Typically when using a stencil, we use a spray stencil adhesive—especially for wall textures. This will help keep the stencil in place and prevent shifting. This is optional and depending on the surface you are stenciling, you might leave some of the adhesive residue behind, but as long as you just lightly mist it, you won’t experience that.

When we stenciled our floors, we didn’t really have a specific outline for placement. It starts with one stencil then just randomly placing the others, then continually filling in the gaps until we got the look we wanted. The pretty light teal color is Robin’s Egg which is a custom tinted SetCoat®. The other colors were custom made by us in some nice shades of grey and good ol’ black.

So, there you have it! We’d love to hear your creative stencil stories, what cool things have you done?