I promised this post way back in September when we finished the kids’ bathroom. I did not forget! I hope you haven’t all been waiting and waiting and WAITING to paint circles on your walls ever since then. Anyway, here it is!

When we redid the bathroom, I knew I wanted round mirrors for it. There’s a vaguely nautical theme in there, and I liked that they were sort of porthole-ish. But the mirrors we picked out (affiliate link) were a little too small to be the only thing on the mirror wall. And a little too boring. There’s not much wall space in this room once the window and linen closet and tub and all that are finished using space, so it was a little tricky to find ways to make the room exciting. So I decided to paint circles around the mirrors, because there is pretty much nothing more exciting than circles, right?! And I further decided that they should be aqua. I’d originally wanted aqua cabinets but decided against it for boring, practical reasons; the aqua circles nearly make up for the pedestrian gray cabinets.

The circles are handpainted, so they are not completely perfect. I looked into maybe cutting circles out of vinyl or something like that, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so paint it was. The color is Valspar’s Beach Blanket Bingo; I picked it to match the color in the sea monster shower curtain:

Here’s how to make your own circles! (I mean, maybe you don’t want porthole-esque mirrors, but circles are fun and you might want to paint one on your wall because of that. A circle in every room, I say!)

These are all going to be terrible iPhone photos. Sorry.

1. Hang your mirror

In our case, of course, we did want circles for mirrors, so first we hung up the mirrors so we could figure out where and how big to make our circles. We figure out how far past the mirrors we wanted the circles to go, and then we traced around the actual mirrors in pencil so we’d make sure the paint went far enough inside the circle (of course, you can also just fill in the entire circle, particularly if you’re not putting a mirror over it).

2. Measure some string and tie it to a pencil to make your circles

You want your string to be the same as the radius of the circle (i.e. half as wide as the whole circle). Dave put a little nail in the center to hold the string in place, tied the other end to the pencil, and then drew the circle by keeping the string taut and going all the way around.

3. Start painting

There’s no magic here: just try your best! We used a small brush for the edges and then a bigger one as we got closer in and didn’t need to worry about perfect edges. As you can see, they are not completely perfect, but they came out pretty well.

And that’s it! I kind of do want to paint a big circle wall somewhere else in the house now. Foyer? Would you like some circles in you? Hmm.

maybe you would like to pin this?