Making Murals

Book excerpt: This practical guide to mural painting explains all the key techniques and design styles you need so that you can get creative in your own home and start 'unsaming' your walls. Murals are a fantastic way to breathe new life into an interior or exterior space. Mural painting is perfect for creating a particular theme in a room, livening up a boring corner of your home and personalising a child's bedroom with their favourite characters. It can also be used to spruce up corridors, hallways and stairwells and other areas of our homes which often get forgotten about. This practical guide to mural painting explains all the essential techniques for getting started including what kind of paints and brushes to use, how to work on various wall surfaces and how to prepare the surface area before painting in order to get the best results. Authors Clara Wilkinson and Mary West, outline the practicalities you need to consider when you are planning a mural such as how much light the area receives and how will it fit in the desired space. They also look at where to find inspiration sources, how to use colour in your work and how different styles of painting suit certain locations. One of the most challenging elements to creating a mural is how to transfer your ideas from paper onto a wall or ceiling and how to ‘scale up’ the design. The authors explore various techniques for transferring mural designs including the traditional grid method and their own innovative ‘doodle grid’ method. Murals offer an exciting opportunity to try out different styles of painting: abstract graphic, painterly and linear are all styles that are looked at in this collection. These painting techniques are explored using step-by-step photography and there is advice on how to combine different techniques to create stunning results. The authors take us on a tour of some of their most exciting wall art and murals and explain, using step-by-step instructions and photography, how you can achieve similar results by either using their design templates or learning how to create your own. Each of these projects is based on a particular theme including Chinoisserie, graphic botanical, celestial, tropical jungle, linear abstract, florals and a painterly abstract design. Just choose your favourite and get started!