Sponges for Wall Mural Painting

Video Transcript

"IAN LOVEALL: I'm Ian Loveall with Expert Village and we're looking at mural painting. I've got some basic materials here. Let's talk about sponges. Sponges are the most incredibly useful thing you will ever have with you while you are painting. I know some artists who do entire wall murals only with cellulose sponges. So cellulose are the synthetic sponges that you'll find at the supermarket for dishes and things. You can--the great thing about these is that they come with straight edges, which can be useful for some things not so much for others. Again, you know experiment and see which ones you like. I am partial to natural sea sponges. And the reason being not a single one is the same. You get an incredible variety of textures and surfaces to work with. And if you don't like what you've got, you just squish it up a little bit and suddenly you have an entirely new surface. So, they're incredibly useful that way. You can get sponges on rollers. I don't like to use these so much because you tend to get some--some edges that don't look great. It takes some practice to get used to those, ordinary sponge rollers. This is a neat tool. It's actually a sponge that's finished in sand paper. And you can get some really cool textures with that and again, lots of different edges to experiment with. And you can also even cut the sponges to suit your-your needs. This is actually a car sponge that I got and mutilated until I was able to get the shape of just a couple of leaf--leaves. This was for a theatrical backdrop I was painting that required about 40 feet of foliage and you can imagine doing that by hand would be nightmare. So, you just dip this in some paint and dab it across the canvass and before you know it, you've got a whole tree of foliage. So, that's another thing to keep in mind. You don't have to work with what you're given. You can take it and turn it into something else."