Our New Place & How to use Keynote to Digitally Paint Your House
I'm excited to share that after 7 months of living thanks to the kindness of dear friends and family, Gus and I finally have our first place in NC. It's in the Triangle and it's a small 1 bedroom apartment that's about to be cozy, awesome central (you know, once we can get unpacked).
I'm also happy to share that moving to this blank slate means a lot of fun home DIY projects are back on the radar and will be shared here on anniemade, so stay tuned if that's your kind of thing.
Today, here's a sneak peek of our apartment (before we moved in!) and a trick on how to digitally "paint" your walls using Apple's presentation program Keynote.
This is our main living space - the living room - from which you can see the bar (that contains the galley kitchen) and a bit of the dining "area" of the right side of the room.
So, I'm itching to fix that crooked cabinet above the bar but that'll wait for a different day.
In any case, the beige had to go. But what to color it instead? I was totally unsure and had to make a decision fast - using the Friday and Saturday before our Sunday move to paint both this room and the bedroom.
And here's where Keynote comes in to help me "digitally" paint the room. Keynote is the Mac version of PowerPoint. Not sure you can use this trick in Powerpoint, but I bet there's a way to. Some websites will let you do this too, but I found this easier for myself.
The process is fairly simple.
1. Open Keynote
2. Drop your image (or images) of your room into a new, blank white slide. Size it so it fits completely in the slide.
3. Click the "Shapes" button and scroll down to the very last tool - it looks like a pen with some red dots.
4. With this pen tool selected, trace the corners of each wall, as if you were creating a parallelogram or rectangle. You do this by clicking dots into place at each corner, then clicking a dot on top of your first one (completing the shape). Here's a photo.
5. When you have a complete rectangle, all you need to do from there is use the "Fill" tool to fill in your shape with your desired color. If you want to get fancy, you can use an online paint swatch then use the Magnifying Glass function under "Show Colors" to grab that online paint swatch color. Just select your shape, hit "Fill", hit "Show Colors," then click the magnifying glass on top of the online paint swatch. This should cause your shape to fill with that exact color.
Basically, you're breaking the walls down into shapes and then changing the colors of those shapes. You can select multiple shapes and change their color together, at the same time, thereby "digitally painting" them.
Here are a few iterations we considered (and a possible solution to cover up the ugly bar cabinets). Can you guess which one we went with for painting inspiration?
So stay tuned to see if you guessed right. I'll be sharing more of the house in May and more in the next few months as we dive into getting settled. Til then, happy digital painting!