Hand Painting Practice for Mural Walls

A few months ago, I came up with the brilliant idea that I should paint my walls in the style of Alisa Burke, the woman that is, to me, the definition of artistic bravery. Hand painted walls have always appealed to me. Ask my parents, they were rather perplexed when I used water paints to draw what was (in hindsight) a rather dreadful flower on my bright yellow bedroom wall. I loved it at the time, my dad did not when, years later, he had to do use three to four coats to cover it up.

As I've mentioned before, I like to do trial runs aka I am not as brave as Alisa Burke. If I'm honest, I'm not convinced I'm ever going to get around to completing this project. I hope I do! In the meantime, it was a useful motivational tool to get me to practice drawing flowers.

 

This one (the long picture above) was drawn on the back of a cereal box (I am nothing if not resourceful!). I used permanent marker simply because it was on hand. I also had to do it in stages because, actually, those fumes are lethal!

 This one I did with paints as I spoke to The Canadian about his day. This one is on the back of a pizza box. I didn't enjoy how it soaked up the paint colours but I did enjoy how messy it was.

 I have been on such a recycling kick at the moment too! My friend bought be a gift in a pretty orange paper bag and now that paper bag has a painting of flowers on it. I discovered pretty quickly that I should draw more than I think I'll need because once you fill in the background the foreground quickly becomes sparse.

 This final one was never completed. I got tired of breathing in sharpie marker fumes. It's amusing to me how quickly I jump from one medium to another. One week it's paint, the next it's sharpies. Oh, my flighty mind!

After all of this I got a little brave and painted directly on the basement wall...I was really into it as well until I realised there was a grumpy spider watching me. That quickly put an end to any big aspirations I had.


Would you ever consider painting directly onto a wall? With the price of wallpapers it seems to be the only affordable option to having pretty walls.