Making Murals by Clara Wilkinson & Mary West

This practical guide to mural painting explains the key techniques and design styles you need to get creative in your own home and start ‘unsaming’ your walls.

Murals are a fantastic way to breathe new life into an interior or exterior space. Mural painting is perfect for creating a particular theme in a room, livening up a dull corner of your home, and personalizing a child’s bedroom with their favourite characters. It can also be used to spruce up corridors, hallways and stairwells and other areas of our homes which can be forgotten.

This practical guide to mural painting explains all the essential techniques for getting started, including what kind of paints and brushes to use, how to work on various wall surfaces, and how to prepare the surface area before painting to get the best results.

Authors Clara Wilkinson and Mary West outline the practicalities you need to consider when planning a mural, such as how much light the area receives and how it will fit in the desired space. They also look at where to find inspiration sources, how to use color in your work, and how different styles of painting suit specific locations.

One of the most challenging elements of creating a mural is transferring your ideas from paper onto a wall or ceiling and how to ‘scale up’ the design. The authors explore various techniques for transferring mural designs, including the traditional grid method and their own innovative ‘doodle grid’ method.

Murals offer an exciting opportunity to try out different painting styles: abstract graphic, painterly and linear are all types that are looked at in this collection. These painting techniques are explored using step-by-step photography, and there is advice on combining different techniques to create stunning results.

The authors take us on a tour of some of their most exciting wall art and murals and explain how you can achieve similar results by using their design templates or learning how to create your own using step-by-step instructions and photography. Each of these projects is based on a particular theme, including Chinoiserie, graphic botanical, celestial, tropical jungle, linear abstract, florals, and a painterly abstract design. Just choose your favorite and get started!