Watercolor Wallpaper

Watercolour wallpapers, painted wet: cosmos in violet and gold with loose edges, white dogwood on a brushed duck-egg ground, pink magnolia on lilac, bumblebees visiting blossom on periwinkle, trout in a river. You can see the brush in all of them. That's the point.

Choosing watercolor wallpaper

Where it works

These are the softest papers in the range, pattern with no hard edge anywhere, so they go where a crisp line would feel like too much. Nurseries. Bedrooms. A bathroom, or a small sitting room. Aqua Dogwood and Wild Rose are our bathroom pair, white blossom on brushed blue-aqua grounds, the two we'd hang over a bath. Bumble Magnolia and Lilac Magnolia go into nurseries and bedrooms. For a kitchen or a hallway that needs waking up, there's Cosmos Splash, fuchsia and marigold cosmos crowding a bright white ground.

Picking between the designs

Start with how wet the paint was. Violet Cosmos and Cosmos Splash have loose, running edges, and the flowers bleed into the ground around them. Aqua Dogwood, Sage Dogwood and Wild Rose are tighter (the brushwork stays in the ground and the blossom sits clean on top). Lilac Orchard looks the most weathered, teal birds and dark red plums on cracked plaster. Then the ground. Lilac sits under Lilac Magnolia and Marbled Violets, periwinkle under Bumble Magnolia, and the dogwoods and roses are on aqua, apart from Sage Dogwood, which is on sage, as you'd guess. Want the paint to catch the light? Marbled Violets and Lavender Sweep run a thread of gold through it. And the trout, Rainbow Trout and River Trout, are watercolour without a single flower.

Related

Looser painted work carries on in abstract wallpaper. The pinks and lilacs show up in pink wallpaper as well, and the blossom branches in floral wallpaper.