Wall mural in my little girl's bedroom
The wall mural in my daughter's room is a work in progress. Not a whole lot of progress lately... but when I began, I did a lot all at once. I decided I wanted it to be a mural of a garden wall that went around the entire room (not a little ambitious, eh?). I found my inspiration in an old picture of a garden wall and a garden urn.
Before painting, I decided to try out my concept as a drawing on my computer:
I thought that looked kind of cool, so I decided to go ahead with it.
Step 1: Prime. Actually, I skipped this step. The walls were beige, I figured it was a neutral enough background and any griminess or marks and even spackle would be covered over by layers of decorative paint techniques.
Step 2: The sky. I wanted the mural to include a sky to cover the ceiling and the upper 1/3 or so of the walls, so I painted that first so that the brick wall could cover part of it and look more natural. In the past I had tried to be too realistic with the sky, following some precise directions I found in a painting book. This time I just used something of a French-brush technique and swooshed and smooshed light blue paint, then off-white paint together on the ceiling and walls. I liked the result.
Step 3: Drawing out the walls. I followed some advice from a book about mural painting, and measured out my walls, then drew the lines with a yard stick. I didn't worry too much about perfect straightness, though I tried to keep it fairly parallel with the floor by measuring up and making hash marks and connecting those with the yard stick, then making my pencil line. At this point I was just concerned with the top of the wall and the cap stones of the columns.
Step 4: Tape off the top of the mural wall. I had to make a protective barrier between what was to become the wall and the sky, not to mention other things that needed to be masked off, like woodwork.
Step 5: Base coat on the brick wall. I just filled in the whole silhouette of the brick wall part of the mural with a gray paint, a gallon I had picked up on the reject rack at Lowes, I believe. At this point the mural looked like this:
Step 6: Faux-paint a stone texture on the wall. For this, I used my favorite technique: plastic shopping bags and glaze. I mix up my paint about 50/50 with glaze, and pour it into a paint roller pan. You don't need to make a lot of glaze. A cool-whip bowl full of each color was more than enough. I went over the base coat with two other shades of gray. So now I had this mottled-looking mess:
So the final part of the glaze was a light gray, thin-consistancy glaze that helped pull together all the other shades of gray into a finish that to me looked pretty convincingly stone-like. Here is the way it looked with final glaze (left) and without the final glaze (right):
Now came the meticulous part.
Step 7: Painting urns in the wall mural. I made the pattern for the urns (based the inspiration urn) out of a piece of cardboard that I folded in half and cut out, then opened and traced at the top of the columns. No two turned out exactly the same, but that isn't a problem. I filled them in with a base coat, sponge painted them, added some green to make it look like they were kinda mossy on the north side, and used some gold metallic paint to make them shine a little. Here is the in-progress and finished look:
Step 8: Detailing the brick wall. This meant getting out the yard stick and measuring rows of bricks and drawing horizontal lines. This included marking off the lip at the top of the brick wall and the tops of the columns. Then the vertical lines were added, forming the individual bricks. They were in a staggered pattern with spaces between, so it was necessary to erase parts of the vertical lines on the mural to form the bricks. It's hard to explain, but looking at the diagram of the mural above you can probably see what I mean.
The most tedious task was outlining the bricks. I used little bottles of black and white craft paint to outline one side of the bricks and the top with white, and the other side of the brick and the bottom with black to produce a three dimensional effect. The same applied to the top of the wall and the columns.
Finally I used a dark-gray paint to fill in the spaces between bricks. They should probably show through to the other side, but for now, they are just filled in. Maybe later I'll have foliage poking through etc.
Step 9: Adding the landscape to the wall mural. For this I did nothing too fancy. I just sketched out free-hand some gradual curved lines to form a horizon, then filled in below it with purplish toward the top and greenish toward the bottom.
So here's the final look:
Oh yes, and a river runs through the mural on one side of the room:
As you can see, it's not really done yet. There needs to be flowers in all the urns, trees reaching over the garden wall, and other embellishments to really make this wall mural complete. But it's a very good start, if I do say so myself.
