How to Paint a Wall Mural for Your Child’s Room or Nursery

I recently became the proud father of a beautiful baby girl. As we prepared for her birth of course one of the major things we had to do was to get the baby room ready. My wife and I decided it would be fun to do a nice mural on the wall. I took pictures of the process and thought it would be a good idea to post it up here so others could get some tips on how to create a wall mural. Hope you enjoy, and please leave me some comments to let me know if it has been helpful.

Materials

So first things first. You need to know what materials you will need to paint the mural. Here’s what you will need:

• An Idea (More on this in next section)
• Interior Latex Paint (I used Valspar from Lowe’s – Eggshell finish. Satin and Semi-gloss would be OK as well.)
• Paintbrushes
• Paint Roller and tray (Tray not shown)
• Carpenter’s Level (To make your lines straight and level)
• Framing Square (Also called Steel Square. Optional, just to check that your grid is square)
• Carpenter’s pencil (Any sturdy pencil will work)
• Patching Compound (Optional – if you need to repair wall defects)
• Spray Texture (Not Shown here. Optional – if you need to add texture back to area you repaired)
• Tape Measure
• Scanner/Printer/photo editing software (Optional – if you need to copy and enlarge an image you are going to create the mural from)

The Idea

We had found this very cute ceiling fan from Lowe’s with pink daisies on it. I thought it would be great to recreate that daisy image throughout the baby room.

The Process

So the next question is how to accurately recreate the daisy in a large format to put on the wall. One option would be to freehand draw the image on the wall, but I’m not that good and don’t have enough erasers for my mistakes. Second option would be to photocopy a daisy and then enlarge it on the wall with a projector and then trace the image. I don’t have a projector and didn’t want to buy or rent one, so I had to think of a different method.