Fun murals to fit your furniture made easy

Contributed by www.furniture123.co.uk

Furniture and decorating shops all seem to be full of all kinds of creative pieces of bedroom furniture or decorations that make a room really fun and personal for a child. However with such a huge range available this can often get quite expensive. One fun and cheaper alternative might be to create a mural for, or even with, your child.

Painting pictures on your walls might at first sound quite daunting; however there are a few simple cheats and tricks that could reduce the artistic ability required. One of the biggest problems with working on a larger scale than you might be accustomed to is that you can’t usually see the whole picture whilst you’re standing close enough to the walls to work. This can mean it’s a little trickier to keep everything in proportion and make symmetrical things actually look symmetrical. If you think you may struggle with this try creating designs that don’t rely on heavy symmetry make the project easy for yourself. It’s also very important that your diligent about taking regular steps backwards whilst creating your initial outline to make sure everything is going up in a proportionate size.

If you really do struggle with the outlining though, or want a safe way to get your young child involved there are a number of ways you can trace the outline onto your wall. If you can get hold of a projector, this is probably the easiest way. Draw your image on a scale you’re more used to. If you’re trying to create characters that specifically match your furniture you could find and project an existing image of the character onto the wall and simply trace the outline of this.

If you can’t get hold of a projector tracing is still an option, you can use a scanner or photocopier to enlarge your image over several sheets of paper and stick it onto some graphite (carbon) paper which you can then pin or blue tac onto the wall. Now if you firmly trace the image you should find that the graphite paper has lightly marked the image onto the wall ready for you to paint.

Another thing to remember about painting on this kind of scale is that fiddly details are no longer so important; you have a lot more space to work with than you might be used to and this really is an advantage.  If you make a small mistake on a scale this big it is nowhere near as obvious as when you work small.

Covering an area this big could take a very long time if you do let yourself get hung up on the details, one way to speed things up is to buy sponge brushes to paint with, these can quickly and accurately cover large surfaces. Save the smaller brushes until the very end when you’re doing your final touches.

You can also save yourself a lot of work by thinking carefully about the order you put your colours up in. For example if you put down a background colour and let it dry first you can then just paint straight over it without having to paint around detailed out lines. Just make sure you let each colour dry before adding the next.

Whilst thinking about colour orders consider if you would like to put a black outline onto your design as a final colour, this can make your image look quite cartoon like, which not everyone likes but there are a number of advantages. Outlines are particularly effective with large scale wall murals as it really makes the details and subtle contrasts in your colours stand out from a distance, even better though it’s a great way to hide any mistakes you may have made by covering over places where you’ve dripped or overlapped the paint, or not got your lines quite accurate. If you’re painting your mural with younger children it’s normally a good idea to take charge of this bit yourself. A number of times now I’ve saved slightly unsuccessful murals painted by children simply by painting a thick outline around the colours they’ve put up. Think of this stage as drawing an outline rather than just another colouring stage, you can use it to add shades and expression lines.

So if your now thinking mural painting might be something you’d like to attempt here is how to get started.

First you need to decide if your wall is appropriate to paint directly onto, if it’s smooth and dry this is probably the easiest option, just make sure the wall is as clean and dry as possible before you get going. If however your walls suffer from damp you may decide it would be better to buy some pre stretched canvas first and then hang this from your wall. This also has the advantage that you can move the painting at a later date if you wish too. As with any home decorating it’s important to protect even cheap furniture so you will certainly want to cover any sofas, armchairs and carpets with a sheet before getting the paints out, and definitely wear old clothes.

When selecting paints, acrylics are probably the easiest to mix and paint with, you can pick up acrylic paints extremely cheaply however you do get what you pay for and more expensive paints will lead to a longer lasting mural.

Good luck, and who knows if the mural in your children’s bedroom goes well you might find yourself creating more grown up murals in your living room or dining room, it’s a great way to add individuality to your whole house!