How to Paint a Mural Like a Pro

So if you follow me on Facebook you’ve seen some of the progress I’ve been making on my daughters tinkerbell room. Last week I decided to get fancy and paint a mural on her wall. I’ve seen a lot of pins on pinterest of how to make your own projector but I asked my friends on Facebook if anyone had one I could borrow and wouldn’t you know it ones of them did! I’m not going to say you need a projector to paint a mural, but I totally do!

The first thing I did was find a pretty tree that had simple lines. This was nothing a Google images search couldn’t solve! I decided to use this tree as my inspiration.

I set up my laptop and the projector in my daughters room and luckily when I had them all the way in the closet the image was just the right size! Now I couldn’t get the image to auto focus on my wall so the whole thing was a bit blurry when I was tracing it, but for my purposes this was totally okay!


Once I had it set up I busted out my AMAZING elmers paint pens. This project would have been 100 times harder if I’d used a regular paint brush. This way was as easy as drawing on the wall! I had to do my tree in sections because I couldn’t get far enough back to blow it up as big as I wanted, but this just added to the imperfectness of the whole project.

I simply traced around the edge of the branches and trunk to create an outline. There were a lot of spaces in my inspiration tree where leaves or flowers covered the branches so I just improvised in those spots. I left five open spaces for flowers in my tree because I knew that I wanted a couple in there.

Once I had the whole outline done it was time to fill in the trunk and branches. Our walls are old school plaster and the have quite a bit of texture to them and I discovered that if I didn’t push too hard to fill in the spots the texture of the walls created an almost bark like texture on my tree! Total bonus!

Once the tree was filled in I grabbed my craft paints and got to work on adding leaves and flowers. This part was a lot of fun because I could add a leaf anywhere that felt a little bit bare or that my tracing was wonky!

After the leaves were on I went back and added some flowers. I wanted to get a couple different colors and sizes so they were totally a hodge podge of colors all mixed together, just like real flowers!

Here are some close ups of my tree, the leaves and the flowers!

Once the paint was dry I hung my daughters name back up and beamed with my sense of accomplishment!