painting

I painted my first mural

We moved into our house last month and are still in the process of making it our own. We’ve put up a bunch of pictures and art which helps it feel more like a home. This is my stepson’s bathroom and green is his favorite color so I knew I had to add some greenery in here to make it more interesting. All I knew is that I wanted to draw some leaves and plants, which are things that make their way into my art pretty regularly.

Here’s a before picture.

Not terribly exiting, right? I had to stand in the tub to get this picture but you get the idea.

So I have painted walls a single color with a roller before. And I have painted many times on canvas and paper. Is that enough knowledge to pull off a mural? Well, I had no idea but I was excited to try out something new and just went for it. I really was just winging it and learned a lot during the process.

The first thing I did was pull out a paint marker and I started drawing on the walls. Honestly this was so much fun and I felt I was healing my inner child during this process.

I’m drawing out where I want these leaves to go. At this point I just wanted to add a variety of shapes to keep it interesting.

Here’s a video of how the sketches on the wall look.

Me for scale.

I went to Lowe’s and got some paint samples. I ended up choosing 5 different types of greens and then got to work. I KNOW I have rollers and larger brushes somewhere in some box in my garage and I refused to buy another set of those, so I just worked with what I had…Regular old paintbrushes.

my 9 year old helped out too! It really makes me happy that he can look at this wall and know that he helped make it happen.

I took way more videos than pictures. I started doing that because I was going to do a series of updates on Instagram and then realized how NOT FUN that made this project. Haha, but I think I will compile all those into a longer form video.

Another progress shot.

here’s the after.

This is the best angle to be able to see the entire mural.

That’s all folks. :) This was such a fun mural, and I’m glad glad I started on a small space. I would love to figure out how to do more detailed pieces or even on a larger scale. I’ll definitely have to use bigger brushes and rollers next time too, haha. Thanks for reading!