POW! BAM! Comic Book Murals

My best friend Jess is renovating her house, and has the cutest room for her son, who is 6.  He's totally into superheros right now, so that's the theme of the room.  She had an awesome idea to have some murals on the wall, and I jumped at the opportunity.  I love to paint on walls.  Just ask my mom, when I was little I drew all over my bedroom walls.  I was only about 3 at the time, but I have definite memories of having to clean it up myself.  

My first step was to design something in Powerpoint.  I like using Powerpoint for graphics, I feel like you can manipulate things easily and change things.  Perfect for roughing up an idea.  Jess sent me a few ideas that she'd seen and I worked from there.  Here's what I came up with:

Jess has a tiny projector that you put a USB memory stick in, and can project on to the wall.   I taped off the points, and used a trick that I love to make the edges really sharp.  You know how sometimes when you peel back the painters tape, it bleeds a bit and looks rough?  Can't have that in a superhero's room!  The trick is to take the wall color (or clear acrylic craft paint if you don't have wall color), and paint from the inside toward the outside, filling up any gaps with wall color/clear.  After this dries, you can paint whatever color you want, and when you peel the tape, it's a perfect, razor sharp edge!  I used this trick in Drake's bedroom, where I did an orange stripe around the room. 

Jess graciously put on a coat of primer before I came back the next time, so the white background would be really opaque.  Then I hooked up the projector again and sketched out the design.

I started filling in the color, and it began to came alive! I also added primer where the letters extended past the points (probably should have done this at the same time as the points, oh well)

The final step was to outline in black.  This was the trickiest part.  I used a Sharpie and a straight edge for the most part, but the tip kept getting gunked up with residue from the paint or something, so I used a paint pen as well.  Same thing happened with the paint pen, but somehow I was able to get it outlined just enough. I used black paint to fill in the larger areas after outlining with the Sharpie.

The black just makes it jump out of the wall, doesn't it? Very dynamic if I do say so myself! All in all, I think it took me about 12 hours to complete both murals.   Almost hard to tell this one from the Powerpoint one!

And a few shots of the darling room.  I love how it's a classic room infused with some fun superhero stuff added in.   I love the white wood ceiling, it's just so inviting.  

I love the superhero sheets! Adorable.