Since we bought our current house a couple of years ago I have toyed with the idea of painting a mural on a huge retaining wall that borders our front courtyard. The wall is around 10m wide and 2.5m high, so no project for the faint hearted. On the other hand it’s only paint. If you hate it you can just cover it over with a new coat.
I do have an artistic streak, but I always say I’m only like a DJ: I don’t write or perform the music, but I take the existing and re-arrange it into something different. That’s what I do with the clothing I paint, none of it is strictly speaking an original art work.
So I wasn’t going to start painting something from scratch on a 10×2.5m wall. My trusty source for material is Pinterest, which pretty much has every image you could ever want, but it took me a long time to find something I loved and felt at the same time reasonably confident that I could execute. Not to mention that there was an unhealthy dose of procrastination before I finally pushed myself into tackling such a big project.
Ironically the image I finally settled on is a wallpaper mural I could have purchased. I happily would have chickened out of painting it myself and done just that, except that my space is so much bigger than the largest size available, and it would just have looked silly. Like a shag on a rock, as we say in Australia. On top of that issue the retaining wall is prone to moisture and outdoor paint will withstand even the repeated trickle of water when it rains, which would certainly wreck wallpaper.
You can see in the photo where the base colour paint has had to be scraped off because it was coming loose from the masonry. I am hoping this will not happen as much again with the right paint, but if it does I can touch it up.
I love the dark green and white of the original, but for my DIY version I needed to use light colours as the court yard is a bit dark, with the garage mostly overhanging it. This is useful protection from sun and rain, but cuts down on light. The colour the wall had been painted previously had been a light neutral and I decided it could stay as a base colour. The contrast needed to be something light and I decided on a sunny yellow to brighten things up.
To make the image fit my wall I had to change it a bit and expand it horizontally in Photoshop to make it into the right proportions. I printed the image off over several pages and stuck it together (lots of practice with patterns came in handy). Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the size of the wall, but big enough to draw a grid on the paper and for each square to be a good size so I could see clearly when transferring the shapes to the wall freehand.
The wall is made of besser bricks and I could use this to draw a grid pattern with chalk without having to measure it all out, which was a big help. Once I had the same grid on the wall as on the paper, drawing the shapes was not as difficult as I had feared. An abstract image is just so much more forgiving than something pictorial (so I won’t be painting any grain silos any time soon). It helped to use a different colour chalk for the image outlines so I wouldn’t get confused with the grid lines. Then it was only a matter of judging where the lines should go in each square and where they should hit the grid guidelines. That needed some concentration, but wasn’t too bad.
The great thing about using chalk is that you can wipe it and start over if it isn’t quite right. I ended up doing that a fair bit.
Once I had chalk outlines on a couple of squares I started to fill them in with paint. This was to gauge how it would look, if the colours I had chosen were right and if the grooves between the bricks would distort the shapes. Getting the shapes chalked on the wall is by far the most difficult part of the process and I didn’t want to get the whole wall done before discovering that there is a problem.
It was great to see that the yellow colour I had picked for the shapes was right at the first try, quite a miracle as everyone will understand who has ever painted a room.
Using a small brush for the tight curves and a larger one for the bigger spaces it took me three days to get the first coat on including the chalk lines, and two days for the second coat. I haven’t completely cleaned the chalk lines of the grid off yet, but I don’t think that will take long. They are not all that visible on the photos, you need to look very closely for the pink.
It was nice to discover that a mural is so much easier than painting a garment, as you can overpaint if you make a mistake. With fabric, once the dye or ink is on, it’s there for good. Too bad if you don’t like it.
So here is my finished mural after the second coat of paint.
Now I am flush with success, I am champing at the bit for some nice pots and furniture in that space. The table is just right, but needs chairs and I would like some outdoor seating as well. If I stick to neutral colours with the furniture and just pick up the yellow and maybe add some turquoise with cushions, I have the choice of changing the mural in the future if I find something I like even better or feel like a change.