I Painted a 10-foot Mural on my Garage Wall
Check out the custom mural I painted dedicated to one of the most iconic tv shows of all time!
Today I decided to try my hand at something I've never done before- painting a mural.
While I have done many larger paintings on canvas, I’ve never done a piece quite as large as a wall mural. So... I decided to design a mural to cover one of my garage walls.
Using my garage wall for a mural was harder than it seemed...
When I don't feel like making the drive to my studio, I often use the garage to work on custom paintings and to rehearse for upcoming speed painting shows. I’ve also done some filming in the space. Hence, the green wall you'll see in the video.
There was a time I was experimenting with some green screen work, but that was relatively short-lived and I just ended up stapling canvas pieces to the wall when I was working on custom paintings or rehearsing for a show. There were A LOT of staples holes which is why the wall was covered in spackle.
Painting the background design for the wall mural definitely wasn’t the smoothest process!
So, I’ll start off by saying painting the background design for the mural took way longer than I anticipated. I figured it would take a day or two, but it ended up taking four. That was mainly due to a shoddy spackle job.
I started by taping up the diamonds, which was a bit more annoying than the typical way people tape up diamonds. Usually, the tape represents the solid strip of color between diamonds, so the tape can be applied and the wall painted all in one swoop.
In my case, I wanted each diamond to touch one another without white or solid color lines in between. This meant that I had to tape and paint some diamonds, then let those dry before I could tape over them to do the adjacent diamonds. Hopefully, that makes sense, but all you really need to know is that it was annoying!
Artist vs Tape: Round 1
So let's backtrack just a bit. After taping and painting the initial diamonds, it was time to pull the first round of tape. Who doesn't like watching a nice clean line appear as the tape is pulled? I even called my wife out to witness the glory of it all. And...it was a major fail.
The wall just pulled right off with the tape. Apparently, the wall was in a lot worse shape than I realized. After years of stapling in the same spots over and over again to hang canvas, the wall was just so weak in certain spots that it needed further reinforcement.
basically painting the background for the mural was a huge pain.
Also, I think maybe my spackle wasn't sealed properly and was a tad dried out. So, frustratingly, my day was now spent applying new spackle, giving it plenty of time to dry, and sealing it in with a layer of white paint for good measure.
From here on out, things went much smoother. Though time-consuming, I was able to get the mural background up without any other major issues and it was finally time to start the fun part!
The inspiration for my mural came from one of my favorite tv shows.
My wife and I are such huge fans of The Office, so I thought why not? And while I was at it, why not get even more specific and paint one of Michael Scott’s personas showcased in just a single episode? The hardest part was choosing between Date Mike and Prison Mike as the subject for the wall mural.
At this point, I used both latex paint and paint markers to create the faces, which in the end, only took about a day. Using paint markers to draw my initial design definitely helped speed up the process, though the bandana took longer than I would have liked to fill in!
But here you have it. I painted a wall mural in my garage featuring... Prison Mike and Dwight K. Schrute.
Fans of The Office… What other characters are worthy of a mural? Let me know in the comments.