Mountain Mural!
I painted a mountain mural on my wall and it only cost me $20!
About a year ago I repainted my room. Violet walls served me very well for 12 years, but I thought it would be nice to change it up!
I wanted something neutral so that I could basically put any color furniture in my room and it still match. But I also wanted something that was unique and added a pop of color. For quite a few years, I have been totally in love with Southwestern/Mountainy style homes, so I also wanted a touch of the West in my room. I LOVE the West. So anything I could do to make my room feel a little more like my home away from home was something I was willing to do!
So, after thinking and Pinteresting... and thinking and Pinteresting... and thinking and Pinteresting just a little bit more... (is Pinteresting a verb? It definitely should be!) I finally decided on what I wanted to do!
All of my Pinteresting led me to some really cool murals! I eventually stumbled across a really cool mountain mural by Pam Lostracco.
I thought it was just so cool! So I decided I would try to figure out how I could do it!
This is a picture of the original artist's mural. Isn't it cool?!
She had a blog post on how she did it, so I followed along and also did my own thing here and there. She was definitely way more professional and precise in how she did things! haha! So you should definitely check out her post if you want to see how an expert does things! But I found a few shortcuts that helped me out since I don't have all of the materials she had. I was also able to do it on a pretty good budget! So stay tuned if you want to know how I went about that!
Well, The first thing I did was go to Lowe's and pic out some colors. My Momma had the awesome idea to just pic out a swatch of colors that I liked and then use that as all of my colors! That really helped because I knew that all of the colors would look great together. It left no room for human error.
Then it was time to buy the paint. I didn't have the budget to buy 8 or 9 cans of paint, BUT at Lowe's you can buy little baby tubs of sample paint for about $3 each!
So, I just asked the guy to mix all of the colors I had picked out and then he put them in the little tubs! This really really helped with my budget! The only problem I ever came across was that I had 9 ranges to paint, but only 6 colors. This was super easy to fix, though. I just made 3 new colors by mixing the paint I had already bought! For instance... pretend I had three ranges to paint but only two colors. I would use the colors I bought on the top and bottom ranges and mix those two colors to make the middle range. That's what I did on three of the layers of mountains in my mural.
My first step in the mural process was research. I wanted mountains. So I looked on Pinterest for pictures of different mountain ranges. What ended up being really cool was the fact that you can pick actual mountains and mountain ranges that mean something to you and put them in your mural! My favorite place in the world is Ouray, Colorado. My family has gone on vacation there ever since I was little. So I decided that it would make me so happy to find pictures of those mountains and paint them on my wall! Basically all of the mountain ranges on my wall are mountains from Ouray/Ridgway, CO. or the surrounding area.
Ouray, CO (Switzerland of America)
Chimney Rock in Ridgway, CO (if you've seen the original True Grit, this should look familiar)
Mt. Sneffels
Ridgway, CO.
After finding my reference pictures, I sketched the mountains out on a piece of paper... One range on top of the other. I then used that sketch as a reference and penciled it in on my wall.
Then it was finally time to paint. I started working on the top layer of mountains. Once I was done with that one, I moved on to the next layer and the next color! I went from top to bottom so that if I accidentally dripped any paint on the mountains below me, I would be able to paint over them with a darker color.
Pretty simple!
Here is a time lapse of my project!
And that's about it!
If you love this mural idea, I really encourage you to try it! It may look hard, but HONESTLY, it was pretty easy! It is definitely a beginner level mural. :D If you can just draw the mountains on your wall (you could even project the image on your wall and trace over it) the rest of it is basically just coloring inside the lines!
