How to make a mural: all the advice

The history of the murals, in a nutshell
Man has always painted on the walls: he did it in the caves, depicting hunting scenes for propitiatory purposes, and he continued to do so in the following centuries and millennia, decorating palaces and churches.

The term murals indicates, in the broadest sense, any painting made on a wall, without therefore indicating an exact historical era.

Nonetheless, it should be stressed that, in its more modern sense, ‘murals’ mostly indicates large-scale paintings with political and ideological connotations, and for this reason often executed externally, for the benefit of the entire citizens.

The flashback of mural painting, after a few centuries of languor, had no social purpose: at the end of the nineteenth century the artists returned to decorate the walls for exquisitely aesthetic purposes, as the murals of the Montecatini spa remind us, for example.

It was shortly afterwards in revolutionary Mexico – when the population opposed the dictatorship of General Porfirio Diaz, between 1910 and 1920 – that the ideological ‘mural’ was born, made in the public square or along the streets to communicate precise messages to the masses: the the social value of art, in those years, was definitively rediscovered, even if it combined visionary or expressionist paintings with realistic style murals.

Starting from the Mexican experience, the mural intended as a powerful form of expression and communication expands all over the world, in the most diverse styles.

Making a mural: how to start?
To make a mural we do not start immediately from acrylic colors for street art .

In fact, it is first necessary to prepare the wall to receive the painting.

The first step is to thoroughly clean the wall on which you are going to paint: whether it is an external or internal wall, it must be freed from dust, incrustations or other stains that could compromise the perfect result of the work.

To carry out this cleaning operation, you usually start with an overall brushing of the wall , then pass everything with a sponge dipped in water and detergent , then rinse everything and leave to dry.

If you want to extend the subsequent duration of the mural as much as possible (which in any case, with acrylic colors for wall painting, will already be very long in itself) you can do even more, scratching the wall paint with some abrasive paper, and then proceed with cleaning.

Once the wall has been cleaned and left to dry, it is necessary to apply a primer, which, in addition to leveling the base, will serve to give the work more strength, enhancing the color range. On our e-commerce you can find different types of primer, from white chalk to modeling paste, up to black chalk.

When the primer is also dry, your wall will be ready to be finally decorated.

It is not said that you can start immediately with brushes and acrylic paints. In most cases, in fact, you will need to draw a preparatory sketch, starting from a smaller sketch made on paper.

In this case, there are two options: you can adopt the grid technique, so that you can patiently bring your design onto the wall, square after square.Otherwise you can instead speed everything up using a projector, so as to ‘print’ your preparatory drawing on your wall, following all the signs with your pencil.