My first mural
23-6-24
The story
A 3 by 3 meters canvas sounds like a dream for every artist, me included. So when my brother and my sister in law asked me to paint a mural for their nursery in 2021 I happily accepted. At this time I was 15 and had been painting for less than a year. They picked a design from the internet and then the process started.
Preperation
First on my list was researching types of paint. I had only painted with acrylic up to this point but as I looked through articles most stated that acrylic is great for murals. So I went out and bought a couple extra tubes of ”Van Bleiswijck Holland Acryl Verf”.
Next was the design. I had to find a way to transfer it to the wall, sketching was not my strongsuit back then. I simplified the design they sent to me and converted it into a sketch in ProCreate, then asked them to rent a projector. With the projector I can trace the sketch on the wall in a smaller amount of time.
Execution
When I arrived at their house I started off by sketching out the design with a HB pencil, pressing lightly to make sure they are erasable later if they don’t get covered by paint. This took around a day.
The next day I started with the tree, as it is the biggest surface of the mural. The process was pretty smooth and I finished the day with the wood base layer done, most of the shading done and did some leaves to test out the best shade.
Over the next couple days I kept working on the tree, in the end taking around 4 days. Somewhere in those days I also did the butterflies as leaves got really boring after a while.
Only thing left were the bears and cleaning up the lines, taking around 2 days.
In the end it took a week of fulltime painting but the result made it worth it. Three years later and the paint is still holding up perfectly fine as well with no discoloration whatsoever.
Results
After cleaning up all the supplies and putting back the furniture I took pictures to show the results:
My experience
I loved painting this mural, it’s by far the biggest canvas I’ve had. I didn’t run into any trouble and my brother and sister in law were very happy with the results. I would love to do another one in the future.
