Back when I was super pregnant with my second, I painted a mural in what would be her bedroom. I don’t recommend it. Despite the difficulties of my first pregnancy, I did have a kind of spritely energy and excitement that was nowhere to be seen for my second. My body had somehow aged 20 years between my two pregnancies. Plus, we were living in a mid-reno-literal-hole-in-the-bedroom-to-the-outside-post-covid world. The chaos, the illnesses, the sciatica…it was not a good time.
All this to say, I phoned it in for my daughter’s mural and it shows. Because I’m no quitter, I always finish what I start, despite immediately regretting all my decisions once I started painting.
Well, I’ve been meaning to redo her mural and finally got around to it recently, almost three years later. And although I’m much happier with this new iteration (and most importantly, my daughter loves it) the process was not without its difficulties, which I will get into below. If you’re considering taking on a crazy project like this yourself, I suggest you read on.
Watercolouring With Acrylic
I first painted over the old mural with regular white wall paint. I had to do about four layers to get it all covered, three foam roller layers and one paint brush layer. In retrospect, since I was going to paint over it anyway, I probably didn’t need to get it to a fully opaque white. I could’ve probably stopped at two or three layers.
Although I wouldn’t say I made any “mistakes” this time around per se, I went in without any real plan or drawings, which might have been helpful. I had a bunch of ideas floating around, but didn’t have any grand vision of what I wanted it to look like.
I ended up starting with a watercolour sunset backdrop, which I don’t think turned out as well as it could have for a couple of reasons.
I used acrylic paint and just stippled portions of the wall with a regular paint brush to get the paint on.
I then used a damp sponge to mix the colour around to kind of thin it to get that watercolour effect. This did not quite do what I intended. It may have been better to mix in a medium so the paint would be easier to manipulate, I don’t know. But the sponge was leaving harsh lines and blotches that I didn’t want for my “watercolour” look.
I ended up going over everything with a wet rag to try to “blend” it all in and get rid of the harshness of the sponge.
I had so many things working against me with this technique. Our upstairs walls are all plaster, so there’s tons of texture on the walls. As such, we use matte paint to try to hide some of the texture, but I feel like these two elements make an already difficult-to-blend medium (acrylic is so fast-drying) not well-suited for trying to make a flowy/blendy kind of watercolour look.
Luckily, I’m a very “trust the process” and “trust myself” kind of a person, so despite the setbacks, I forged ahead and I think I got it to an acceptable place in the end.
Knowing what I know now though, I might not have tried to do the whole watercolour effect thing. In the end, I think there’s enough going on in the mural that I don’t think the eye focuses too much on the imperfections of the backdrop.
Forging Ahead Without A Plan
Maybe it was fortuitous that the watercolour sunset didn’t turn out quite how I’d hoped. One of the ideas I was toying with was my kids in a hot air balloon floating in the sky. I love hot air balloons. I mean, talk about the most whimsical way to travel! And I thought, what better way to hide some of the worst parts of the sunset backdrop??
I honestly can’t believe how symmetrical I managed to get it! I normally sketch out my oil and acrylic paintings (especially the big ones) before I start painting, but this was pretty much freehand. This is a level of trusting myself and the process that I have never experienced before because the stakes were so high. I wouldn’t be able to just paint over my mistakes with white and start over, considering the painstakingly blended out sunset background.
I mean, have you ever tried to just draw a circle??? I can’t believe my own audacity. And although it’s not perfectly symmetrical, it’s so close!
I also didn’t know what colours I was going to use when I started either. I just began mixing and they all turned out looking so good together and working well with the sunset too!
One thing to keep in mind if you’re going to do this is that I should’ve painted over the sunset in a white to prime the surface before I started in with the colours. It would’ve made it so much easier to cover the paint that was already there, and make the ballon colours brighter and less muddy.
Luckily, I realized my mistake pretty early on and made sure to do that on the rest of the mural.
I was originally going to paint my kids in the balloon as they are now, as real human children, but realized 1) I have never been good at painting people 2) the whimsy of the scene would just feel more complete if the kids were animals too.
So I decided to paint them as cute little penguins in their favourite winter hats!
And then, I had a sudden epiphany that the raccoon that was already there on the wall needed some buddies, and they had to be having a tea party. We are die-hard tea party lovers at our house!
After all that, I felt like the scene was a bit unbalanced and incomplete, so I added in a tree.
I completely freehanded the tree, which I’ve never done before. Again, I always do a simple pencil sketch of everything I paint to get the proportions right and to see if I like the look, but I guess I just wanted to go for it this time!
The tree definitely turned out darker and more spooky than I intended. Maybe a reflection of how dark and spooky my heart really is??? You’ll see in the finished photos that the flowers soften the look a lot, but this might be something I revisit/change in a few years.
At this point, I had spent almost 30 hours working on this project and I was definitely losing steam. And it shows! It’s hard to know exactly how long something like this will take and how much energy/patience you’ll have to complete it. And for someone like me who always goes full steam ahead and makes it a point to finish every single thing I start, this can mean things start to get sloppy near the end.
But perseverance and belief in myself is something I am never lacking. Also a healthy perspective that perfection is the enemy of progress, and things can always be adjusted and improved upon later!
Good Enough (For At Least The Next Few Years?)
Maybe my satisfaction with this project can come from the fact that I didn’t have some grand vision going into this. It was truly just slapped together from several different ideas I had floating around my brain.
I can truly nitpick so many things if I look at it for too long. The spooky tree, the flat flowers, the lip of the teacups that should be curved out more to look like more like teacups, the incorrect balloon highlight that I am ABSOLUTELY NOT FIXING (I’ve already spent hours on it)…
But in the end, there are so many elements that I love! My kids as penguins in their favourite winter hats coming in for a landing at the woodland tea party.
This little bunny, so cute and fluffy looking!
And the absolute high I will be living on for the next five years from when my daughter walked into the room and whispered, “Wow.”
So let this be a lesson to all of you that there is no perfection in art or in life! And you can always paint over it.
xoxo
