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.

There is a tried-and-true process for creating murals known as the Grid Method. Here are the basic steps, and I will walk through each in greater detail later in the article:

• Find an image or design you want to recreate for a mural. This could be from a photograph, magazine, photocopy, etc.
• Using a ruler and square, you will draw a grid of equal size squares directly onto the image.
• On your wall, you will create another grid of equal number of squares as you did on your image. Only these squares will be larger. It is important to keep the scale. For example if your image gris has 1 inch squares, you could do 1 foot squares on your wall. I’ll explain this more later.
• Once you wall grid is done, you will then draw in the image going square by square. At this point you are free-handing it, but it is much easier since you are drawing only what is in each square.
• Once the overall pencil drawing is done, you can now paint in the color using rollers for large areas and brushes for fine lines.

The next steps I will show the steps I went through to create my mural:

Creating the Image to Copy

Since the image I wanted to recreate was a daisy from the fan blade, I scanned one blade from the fan with my printer/scanner, then loaded the scanned image into my Macromedia Fireworks image software. From here I cropped the image to show just one daisy and then enlarged the image to around 6X6 inches.

I then printed this in black and white on my printer.

Using a ruler and square, I measured out gridlines directly onto the image. Each grid square is 1 inch by 1 inch. There are 5 squares across and 5 squares down. Your grid on the wall will also be 5X5, but larger squares.

You’ll notice I also drew some diagonals. These are not precisely measured, just put there simply to help me line the petals up right later on.

Preparing Your Wall

Unless you have a brand-new house, you probably have some damage on your walls. Fill in any holes or uneven spots with patching plaster or spackle then let it dry completely. You’ll see here I had to remove a shelf and left some holes. If you have large areas you have had to repair, you may need to buy some spray texture from the paint or hardware store. It comes in a spray can for about $13. You can adjust the texture to match what is already on your wall. Make sure you have good ventilation when you do this because this stuff is strong.

At this point you should also remove any outlet or light switch covers. WARNING: Always a good idea to turn off your main power breaker when messing with outlets and switches. Just removing the covers is not a big deal, but you can’t be too careful. And if you have little ones crawling around, keep them away from here. You don’t want them sticking slobbery fingers into outlets or inhaling the fumes from the paint.

Drawing Your Wall Grid

After you have prepared your wall and fixed any defects, you are now ready to draw your grid. For my grid I chose to make the lines/squares about 1.5feet X 1.5feet. To draw the grid, you will use your carpenter’s level to make sure your lines are level both horizontal and vertical. And a tape measure to measure the lengths.

• First, mark a centerpoint on the wall with your pencil which will mark the exact center of the mural. This is not necessarily the center of the wall as in my case since my daisy is offset.
• From the centerpoint, measure a line through that centerpoint both vertical and then horizontal to mark the width and height of the mural. In my case the mural is 7.5 feet high by 7.5 feet wide. So from the center I would measure 3.75 feet up and make a mark, then 3.75 feet down and make a mark. Then 3.75 feet to the left of center, Then 3.75 feet to the right of center. Now you have the marks tha mark the otside edges of your square.
• Now using your level (or if you have a cool laser level that attaches to the wall) draw a vertical line from each your side marks. Do this again horizonatally at the top and bottom marks. You will now have a large square on the wall.
• Now using your tape measure, measure the smaller squares on the top/bottom edges and side edges For mine, I measured from the top left corner across. 1.5 feet for each square. So I get five across and five down, just like on my paper image.
• Use your level to draw the grid lines now.
• In this photo you can see how I use the level to make the lines. Note, you can also see the cross I marked for the centerpoint:

Here is the final grid on the wall. It is scale to the smaller image grid on the daisy image. 1.5 feet on the wall = 1inch on the paper image.

Drawing Your Image

Now that your grid is done. You can start drawing your image onto the wall.

• I taped my paper with the daisy and grid onto the wall.
• Starting from the center of the wall grid, I draw in each grid corresponding to the grid on the paper. At this point I am drawing freehand, but it is easy because I am only drawing one square at a time. Since each square on the wall is in proportion to each square on the paper, your wall image will end up in proportion as well.

Here is the wall after I have drawn the image:

Painting the Mural

Now that the image has been drawn, you can paint the mural. I used Valspar interior latex paint from Lowe’s. Any interior paint will do. If you’re painting in a baby room you might want to consider Low VOC paint which doesn’t have the smell and toxicity of other paints. The Valspar wasn’t too smelly though.

I started the painting with a small pointed artist’s brush around the edges of the flower. This is the color that will be on the whole wall.

After I outlined the flower with the paintbrush, I then filled in the rest of the wall with the paint roller.

Next step was to paint in the inside of the flower. There were still pencil lines, so I erased what I could, then painted with white paint over the inside of the petals:

After that was done I needed to paint the darker purple part of the petals. I used masking tape to mask off what would be the white outline. Then painted the darker color. When you remove the tape it leaves a white area that outlines the petals.

That didn’t work so well except to give an even thickness to the white outline. The problem is that with textured walls the paint tended to bleed under the tap and leave cloudy edges. I had to go back with a fine brush like in the previous step and paint the lines sharp with white paint.

Complete

Here are photos of the finished room. It was a fun project, and only took a couple days to complete. Though this mural does not have a lot of detail, you can use the same techniques to create murals with as much detail as you want. Be creative and have fun. And please leave me a note and let me know if this was helpful or interesting to you. Thanks!

Here are some of my other articles:

Chile Rellenos with Roasted Corn, Chicken and Red Ancho Sauce

How to restore an Ugly Fireplace

How to Tile a Bathroom Floor