How do you paint a mural on an interior wall?

Answer 1

Start with a clean dry, neutrally painted wall.

Get your dimensions accurately measured and on a piece of graft-paper, draw your design for the wall. Make sure it is to scale.

If you have a projector, use it to project your drawing onto the wall and using chalk outline the drawing.

If you do not have a projector, and can not borrow or rent one, use a chalk line from the hardware store or use a long level and tape measure to draw a grid on the wall and manually draw your picture onto the wall using your scale drawing as reference.

There are even people with enough confidence and talent to use chalk and draw the outlines of their design directly onto the wall, without a preliminary drawing, but this can lead to problems with composition and perspective down the road. If you are just starting out or relatively new to doing murals, it is wisest to work from a scale drawing.

Once your outline is finished, take a good look at the drawing and make whatever final adjustments you feel are necessary. Then start painting.

Use a good quality acrylic paint, that is light fast and permanent. If you are using brushes be sure to use good quality brushes of a large enough size to cover the large areas you are painting. The smaller brushes will be used for the finish and detail work, so don't forget them. Many mural artists use air-brushes (or even air-guns for very large walls) but I recommend you have lots of practice with an air-brush before undertaking a mural. This is no place to be "learning".

If you are right handed, start in the upper left corner, (for lefties, start in the upper right, moving down and away from your starting point. Work on any background areas that will have subjects in the middle and foreground that will over lap them. Work carefully and try not to smudge the chalk lines of the areas you have yet to paint.

Move on to your middle ground and then your foreground, only painting over things that are already dry.

Once the basic painting is finished, go back and add your finishing touches (shading, highlights and fine details).

Remember to step back regularly to see how the overall wall is progressing. Often when you scale a picture up you will fine the small areas that have no detail in them become much bigger and feel empty. You may want to add more texture or detail to these areas.

Take your time, murals need to dry before you can paint over things. Working standing on a step ladder or even a chair is fatiguing, so take regular breaks to walk around or stretch. Look after yourself too, eat, drink lots of water and occasionally change your focal distance to keep your eyes from tiring.

Once the wall is finished, have one last look at it, check for things you forgot, make all of your last minute changes and walk away to let it dry. One of the hardest things is to know when to stop, the bigger a painting is, the more temptation there is to keep adding things. This can result in a mural that is cluttered or too "busy." Know how close the viewer is going to be from the mural when it is finished. The closer they will be, the more fine detail the mural can support. If your Mural will be on an exterior wall ten feet off the ground, it is wasted time energy and talent to do features that are two inches high.

Finally if the wall will be in a high traffic area or a high moisture area it is a good idea to seal it. Give the wall two to three days to dry fully, then use a low-luster or mat finish polyurethane, applied with a roller, to seal the entire wall.

*Please note, many polyurethanes will yellow over time so read the can carefully.

I do know some mural artists who use a professional grade air-gun to spray the sealer on, but this requires better knowledge of the workings of an air-gun than most people have. Not to mention over-spray and the need to work in a room that is properly prepared for the use of spay sealer.