When the whole wall becomes your canvas
With a little planning, this could be your moment to do a home mural that delivers big results
If your walls have you thinking about climbing them, consider mural art instead.
As we stay home and mostly indoors during the coronavirus pandemic, your empty walls may be staring right back at you.
“The more time you spend in your space, the more you think ‘Could that wall use something?’ ” said artist Jasmin Pannu. “People are spending more time in their home now and they’re starting to notice the environment that they live in as well as the ambience they want to create.”
Around the city, Pannu is best known for her mural art. She has created over 80 mural art projects which have adorned the walls of doctor’s offices and restaurants as well as private residences. “In the beginning, I was mostly just doing nurseries,” Pannu said of her home commissions.
“But in the past two years there has been a lot of demand for people looking to have more murals throughout their homes … staircases, accent walls and entertaining areas. It’s really shifting from something illustrative and child
focused to something that’s more sophisticated and upscale.”
Compared to hanging art or photographs, the permanence and larger scale of mural art can have a more profound impact on your interior design. Pannu’s residential mural commissions cost anywhere from $500 to $5,000, depending on the size of the project and the intricacy of the design.
When working with a new client, Pannu said, she asks a list of questions that anyone considering a mural should also ask themselves. “Consider the space and the people in the room when designing,” she advised. “Is this a high-energy space or is this somewhere that I just want to relax?”
Pannu also factors in the existing architecture and colours of the room, using shapes already in that space and complementary shades to make the mural more cohesive.
While her mural projects are currently on hold during the pandemic (she’s focusing on canvas art commissions instead), she insisted that there are easy designs that beginners can tackle in isolation. Tools like measuring tape, painter’s tape, a level and chalk will help you pull off the look.
“Always start with a sketch and use chalk before paint,” Pannu said. “Just chalking something out and onto the wall will give you an opportunity to see it before you paint it.” If possible, have some of your wall colour on-hand so that you can easily correct mistakes. “If there is something that goes horrendously wrong, I know I have course correction.”
Pannu uses Behr wall paint for her designs. The amount you need will depend on the size and type of design, but a 425mL sample-size tin goes a long way, covering about 1.5 square metres. Not all stores are custom-tinting household paint during the pandemic — the service is on hold at Home Depot, for example. But try your local Home Hardware, as some locations are taking orders for tinted paint online or by phone. Otherwise, you could also order paint from your local art store — in that case, Pannu suggested acrylic paint and matte finishes for beginners since they are less likely to show imperfections.
You could even take advantage of the paint you already have in your home, as Mar Ward of the Toronto lifestyle blog To & Fro did for a mountain muralshe completed in her toddler daughter’s bedroom two years ago. “We had grey throughout the house so we took a lot of the paint that we already had and just added a few darker colours to it,” Ward explained.
“Really, all we needed to buy was a small sample size which was $5.” Ward tallied the total budget of her mural project at just over $100, but this includes the earlier purchase of supplies like paint trays, rollers and paint which she already had on hand from other rooms in her house.
Ward’s design took advantage of painter’s tape to create the peaks of the mountains. “The type of painter’s tape that we used made a difference,” she said. “We had started with the cheapest one but we definitely saw a little bit of bleed so we had to go back over with a higherquality painter’s tape. It’s worth it if you want to get clean lines.” Ward recommended using FrogTape for this.
Ward’s mountain mural only took a half a day to complete, most of which was time waiting for layers of paint to dry. “It was very simple,” said Ward, who doesn’t have any professional art experience. She used Pinterest as a source of inspiration for her mountain mural but came up with the design on her own.
For those needing a bit more guidance, Pannu has shared some simple mural design templates on her blog that are easy for beginners to recreate.
“It doesn’t always have to be like, ‘I painted like a realism portrait of my grandma on this wall,’ ” she joked. “Sometimes it’s the easiest concepts that make the biggest difference.”