Basics of Painting a Wall Mural

Series Summary

Feeling hemmed in by the drab walls in your living room? Bored with those same old posters and prints? Wish you were some place else when you sit down on the sofa to enjoy that glass of wine? Well why not add a palm-covered Jamaica beach or the rolling hills of an Italian vineyard to your mundane living space! With a wall mural you can conquer space and time to bring a scenic vista from anyplace you like into your very own home. Watch a knight joust outside of your veranda or an epic battle on Mount Olympus take place above your lazy-boy. Or simply recreate your favorite sunset from your last vacation. Anything is possible with a wall mural!

In this series of painting lesson videos, our professional artist Ian Loveall takes you from the planning stage to the execution of the masterpiece for your wall. He begins with an overview of murals in art history, including early frescos and French Rococo murals. Then he gets down to business, telling you how to transfer your small sketch to the wall. You will learn about basic art concepts as creating light sources and vanishing points, as well as what colors will work best for your wall project. Not sure how to create a believable shadow in a painting? Wondering how to ensure that your art is around as long as you are? Ian covers all of this and more in our extensive mural painting series.

Video Transcript

"IAN LOVEALL: Hi there. My name is Ian Loveall. I'm with Expert Village and today we're going to be talking about mural painting. I've been painting murals for about six years now and we're here in the home of [PH] Rikki Marie Graham and as you can see behind me we've got a mural on the wall. That is the first commissioned mural I did. So, today I'm going to take you through a brief history where murals come from and then sort of take you through step by step of how you go from an idea or a thumbnail sketch to now what you see on the wall behind me. I have been drawing, painting, doing something with art since I could hold a crayon. Since then I've sort of given up crayons and picked up paintbrushes instead. As a child I was very blessed to be very close friends with Debbie Kunic, a professional artist, who works and lives on the Central Coast of California and I studied under her for a couple of years and she actually did the first mural I ever saw which was in my sister's bedroom. She did a beautiful landscape mural as seen from the Central Coast where we-where I grew up. After that I moved down here to Valencia where I studied under Jay Wegter, a watercolor artist. He taught me plein air painting which is painting in the open air. And the great thing about that is it teaches your eye to pick up colors that can't be seen with a camera, so as opposed to working from photographs, you can get much more rich and realistic colors working in the open air which is great. I've been studying at the College of the Canyons. I'm a Fine Arts major there. I study under Joanne Julian. She is a renowned artist whose work can be seen in Tokyo, all over the America, North and South. So, enough about me and let's get on to the painting, the history of murals, where did they come from, and that will take us to a discussion of frescoes."