Painting a Mural
In my previous post, I dealt with planning and sketching out a mural. All that remains is to paint the real thing but, just before we get into that, you need to draw a grid over your sketch. This can be as fine or as coarse as you think best suits the drawing, but I hope that you’ve chosen a design that is simple enough for just eight to twelve cells in the grid to cover adequately.
The grid separates the picture into several smaller areas that will be easier to deal with one at a time. Now scale up the grid to full size and sketch it on to the surface to be painted. So, if for instance your sketch has squares of one inch per side, you might have squares on the wall or pool bottom of one foot per side.
Now we can begin to paint, outlines first. Study each square of the grid so that you see the shapes contained separately from the whole picture. Using a small brush and a light color (so that it is easy to cover with another color if you make a mistake), repeat the shapes in outline within the corresponding square on the full size grid. When you have done that, move on to the adjoining square and repeat the exercise. And keep doing that until all the squares are filled.
Now when you stand back to get an overall view, you should see your originall drawing magnified upon the surface of the wall or pool. If there are areas that don’t seem quite right, adjust the outlines by re-painting them, then painting over the errors with the background color. When you are happy with the outlines, go over them with a black or dark grey so that they stand out.
Finally, it is merely a matter of mixing to get the colors you decided upon and filling in the relevant shapes. If you’re doing a pool bottom, watch where you’re putting your feet so that you don’t stand on a line and smudge it. Work from the top of the drawing downwards and you’ll not have to stretch over a recently-painted area to reach something in the middle.
And that’s all there is to it. You should now be the proud owner and creator of a huge work of art. Congratulations!
Murals aren’t my cup of tea. Not because I don’t have eyes for them but because they make me feel so insecure. Murals are so inspiring and at one look at it they make me feel so envious of the talent possessed by the painter who did it.
I can only work on small spaces but when it comes to murals I don’t think I have the power and the whole focus to finish even half of it. What’s the best thing that an aspiring muralist should keep in mind in order to achieve in this field?
John
By Portrait From Photo on December 1st, 2006 at 12:25 am
I think it’s all about confidence, perhaps the confidence gained from the thought that, if it doesn’t work out, it can easily be painted over. Painting a mural is a big job, yes, but not one that should frighten us - if we can paint in small spaces, there is no reason to believe that large areas are any different. It’s merely a matter of scale: sketch the original idea and then enlarge it as suggested. And be bold with those strokes - nothing worthwhile was ever created without the occasional mistake happening along the way!
By Clive on December 1st, 2006 at 1:23 pm