Clients wanted to have a stone wall behind their TV, but real stone was too expensive. I had done several rooms in their home already, so they turned to me for a solution. Of course I could turn their vision into a reality! They told me the stone shape and color scheme that they would like, and left the rest up to me.

First I applied a thin layer of a gritty textured plaster tinted a light gray. Then I painstakingly ripped both sides of one inch wide blue painters’ tape, and applied the ripped tape into the rectangular shapes of the “stones” on top of the newly-textured wall. Then, with a trowel I applied a layer of plaster on top of the whole wall. When almost dry, I had to go and find all the blue tape and carefully remove it before the plaster dried and the tape remained underneath it. So now there was an impression of white rectangular shaped stones, with grayish grout lines on the whole wall. The next step was to individually color glaze all of the stones to give them a realistic effect.