How to Research a Child's Bedroom Mural

Video Transcript

"Now you can't just put your paintbrush to the wall and expect a great mural to just form itself. It requires plenty of planning and thinking ahead before you actually start to paint. One of the things I recommend is consulting a good encyclopedia or other type of basically book ware. You can start looking at types of creatures and animals that you want to have in your mural. Today we're going to be doing an African Savannah mural. So I'm going to be looking at creatures and animals that are on the Savannah to get an idea for colors, shapes, sizes, topics I want to have in my mural, other topics that may be inappropriate. So definitely, think ahead, start doing some research, hit your local library to get an idea of what type of animals. I mean, there can be a lot more of animals in the African Savannah that just lions and zebras. So definitely, give yourself some time and once you start getting an idea, make a list down. You don't want your mural to be jam-packed. You don't want it to be too busy. So you want to make sure you want to have a certain number of animals in your mural. So, definitely write out a list, maybe get like your top five, and then go from there. Then we can basically start moving over to where we're going to, planning and sketching out how our mural is going to look. It's time to kind of sketch out a plan. You don't want to go into a mural blind, you want to have kind of an idea of what you want in it and where it's going to be placed. So let's kind of take these elements one at a time here. First off, I have a nice fuzzy lion. The other important thing to keep in mind is you don't want realistic animals for your child's bedroom. Maybe if they're older maybe they can be a little more intense but I'm assuming a child under the age of 8. Yeah you want fluffy, happy, smiling animals. You don't want you know big, "rrroooooaaaaarrr" lions. That's the stuff of nightmares. So we have a nice friendly lion, we have Savannah grass blowing in the wind. We also have some nice clouds above rolling hills and a nice blue sky. Some of the other animals in our Savannah mural is going to be a zebra in the background strutting his stuff. We also have a couple of meerkats hanging out on a couple of rocks down here. It's important to keep in mind, this is just a general guideline. Things may be a little bit different in our mural. Maybe we'll have one meerkat as opposed to three. Have another animal poking their heads out. But just make sure you have a plan of attack before you start painting your wall."