Angela Navarra and her beautiful nursery

Hello all!

Our blog post for you today is a wee interview with one of our wonderful illustrators, Angela Navarra! She has created the most beautiful nursery for her ever so cute little boy. 

Have a read below of what inspired her and the process Angela went through to create such a wonderful nursery!

I’ve always had a deep fascination with the ocean. It has always given peace and relaxation to my husband, Dom, and I. We wanted Maddox’s room to have that same feeling. I knew I wanted to do an ocean theme for Maddox’s nursery so I set out brainstorming ideas when I was pregnant. At first I thought of doing a painted mural but that seemed so permanent. I wanted something I could remove easily just incase Maddox had different ideas of what he wanted in his room. I’ve noticed so many awesome vinyl decals for sale at retail shops and I thought that would be the perfect solution to my commitment phobia! 

At first I started looking up all sorts of sea life in books and online. I created a reference folder and started sketching. I got totally carried away and started inventing my own animals. See Merferret below! :D

After the sketching I started to vectorize all of the creatures since I knew those were the type of files I would need to submit to the sticker company. Then I moved onto color and that was a tough one! Our guest room, soon-to-be nursery, was blue and I thought going monochromatic might help us achieve that calming feeling we wanted for Maddox’s room. I changed my mind several times and decided I had to add a pop of color. I went for a snack in the fridge later that day, like I often did when I was pregnant, and saw cantaloupe! I knew that creamy orange would give me the pop of color I was looking for! All my pregnancy eating helped my work and my baby - all the reason to eat some more! :D

Now came the measuring! I took measurements of the wall in Maddox’s nursery and created a mockup in Illustrator to help me figure out how I wanted to layout all the creatures. It was fun to finally see all the elements work with one another but something was missing… Hand-lettering! I made a hand-lettered quote and put that front and center. That helped everything come together!

Finally, I found a sticker company in Canada and sent my files along. It took a month, after seeing some proofs, and the decals arrived! I went along  peeling and sticking them up in the span of a week. Dom and Maddox helped the each time. Dom held the ladder as I climbed to adhere the decals and Maddox pointed and babbled with excitement! He also tried to eat a few of them :D To me, that is the official seal of approval! He likes them!

The whale, merferret, and round submarine are currently being printed and will be added to the other walls so it will feel like we are swimming around with all the sea life!