The brush has been set down, the paint has dried, and another work of art now stands proud.

In this edition, we'll be unraveling the journey of my recent mural project for the T-Mobile Customer Experience Center in Kingsburg. A journey filled with many colors, intricate details, and many lessons learned along the way. Let's dive in, shall we?

The Concept

It's a tribute to the Central Valley's unique proximity to a host of exceptional places - Yosemite, Sacramento, Pismo Beach, Santa Cruz, Hollywood, you name it! It takes inspiration from a popular Central Coast artwork and builds on it with my style.

A Stroke of Learning

Before I break down how this mural was made, I want to start by sharing what I learned. Being so new to painting murals, each project teaches me something new.

This mural took 2x longer per square foot than my Kingsburg Mural.

After finishing my first mural, I did some math to figure out how long each square foot of the mural took. This number ended up around 24 minutes per square foot.

This Central Valley mural for T-Mobile was right around 56 square feet, so I thought it would take around 22 hours to complete.

I was wrong. It took 46.5 from initial sketch to final brush stroke.

I think that’s because I wasn’t applying solid color and ended up going over sections multiple times for all the various colors and shades.

I want to explore other paints.

The hunt for the perfect paint is on. This project acquainted me with a heavy-bodied acrylic that I hadn’t tried before. It felt really nice going on the wall compared to some of the fluid acrylics I’ve been using.

I’ve used Golden Fluid Acrylics on both of my murals so far. And the only reason I chose that was because of a recommendation in a YouTube video of a successful muralist I follow.

Other than different types of acrylics, I’d also love to try out spray paint. It seems like a quick way to lay down a lot of color

To include list materials or to not?

Here's a fun fact – if you're planning to include the cost of materials in your price rather than separating them, you might want to up the total by about 20-30%. It’s a business tip, direct from the field, or should I say, the wall!

For the Kingsburg mural, the city asked us to separate out our materials and artist fee. For this mural, I decided to lump them together so I could just show one final price to the client. This sort of bit me in the but because I ended up making slightly less per hour on this mural than the Kingsburg one.

Lesson learned, I think I’ll keep them separate and increase my rate a bit now that I have more experience.

MuralShield goes on fine with a spray bottle and brush.

Outdoor murals should be protected with something like MuralShield. It does a great job of protecting the artwork from UV, weather, etc. Their directions recommend spraying with an airless sprayer or solvent-rated pump sprayer. I used a pump sprayer on the Kingsburg mural and will definitely use it again on larger works.

For this mural, which was a lot smaller. I figured it might be easiest to use a spray bottle. But I didn't know if it would hold up.

It worked like a charm when applied from a chemical-resistant spray bottle and brushed on.

I need to remember sunscreen!

In the whirlwind of art creation, don’t forget to wear sunscreen, folks! As much as we'd love to immerse ourselves in our work, protecting our skin from the sun's rays is essential.

I was mostly in the shade while working on this mural but on Saturday I spent 10 hours painting. A good chunk of this day was spent in the sun and I didn’t even think about sunscreen. I was in the flow and nothing could stop me.

Well… Now my neck is paying for it with a nice burn.

For the Data Lovers

Let's get statistical for a moment:

• The journey from sketch to the final coat of MuralShield took 46.5 hours
• The design phase took 8 hours
• Planning took around 4 hours
• Initial coat of MuralShield took around 2 hours
• Priming took about 1.5 hours
• Painting took 29.5 hours
• Final coat of MuralShield took 1.5 hours

My 7 Step Process for Making a Mural

I know I’m new to painting murals but I’m not new to working with clients to make their creative visions come to life. One thing I really pride myself in when it comes to working for someone else is bringing them along for the journey. I don’t want to end with a final “tada”, I want to check-in along the way and incorporate my vision with their vision.

Here’s how this process looked on this mural:

1) Sketchploration

After an initial meeting with the client to learn about what they are looking for, I start off by sketching out as many ideas as I can.

For this mural, the only direction I got was that it should be inspired by the Central Valley. I timeboxed my sketching session to a few hours so I don’t spend forever on it. Usually some of the initial ideas end up being the best ones. There are no bad ideas here.

Depending on how much I like the idea, I share between 3-6 normally. For this T-Mobile mural, I showed them 8 because I really liked a lot of the concepts I sketched.

I’ve learned over the years to not show any ideas that I dislike because the client will ultimately pick THAT one.

I like to organize my sketches into an easy to digest format so my clients can give feedback easily. I give each idea a letter, number, or unique name to make it easy for everyone to reference. When I send this to the client, I make sure to give a deadline for feedback.

2) Decide and refine

In rare cases, the client may not like any of the ideas and you’ll have to go back to the drawing board. I think this has only happened once in my career.

In some other cases, they’ll like one idea and want to run with it. 

In most cases, they’ll want to combine things from multiple ideas. 

For this mural, the client liked two of my ideas and wanted to combine them. The two ideas they wanted to combine actually worked perfectly together without a lot of “Frankensteining”. I did a quick sketch for my own visualization but didn’t send it to the client. Because I felt so confident in the idea they wanted, I moved right into high fidelity. 

In this case, it meant making a digital painting of the design so that I could work out colors and details. 

Here’s a timelapse of that entire process.

https://youtu.be/cpCh7hXpfBY

Instead of showing multiple options in this round, I showed one. Because I was working digitally, making edits would be a breeze. I made sure to set up my file with separate layers for all the things.

3) Finalize the design

My client got back to me with a bit of feedback about the refined design. They liked everything about it and wanted to see if I could find a way to incorporate the words “Central Valley” into it somewhere. 

I went back into Procreate and knocked out some options. A few of the ideas brought back a concept from the sketch phase. 

I organized the options, gave them unique names, and sent them off for feedback.

Here’s the final design mock that was approved.

4) Nail down color mixes

Once the design is approved, I move into planning. First up, figuring out what the colors in the mural are made of so I can buy the right paints.

I do this by using a tool from Golden that worked really well for my Kingsburg mural. This tool lets you pick colors and mix them at different ratios, giving you a preview alongside. 

I’m able to plan the mix ratios for the entire mural. 

5) Estimate paint quantities

Once I’m done figuring out ratios, it’s time to figure out quantities. I start by placing a scaled square foot grid over the design. I can choose a color, look square by square, and eyeball how many squares that color fills up. This gives me a rough idea and I round up from there. 

Next, I can use the square foot estimates and the ratios I got from the last step to figure out just how much of each color to purchase. For the Kinsburg Mural, I underestimated it a bit. This time I rounded up more and didn’t run out of a single color. Although, I do have more paint left over than last time. 

6) Make outlines

The last step before I move to the wall is to create an outline version of the design. For this mural, I went back into Procreate and hid all the color. Then I converted some lines to black and sketched new lines over key areas, like the spacing of the trees and branches. I didn’t need to draw every single detail in the landscape portion of this design. For the sign portion, I made sure to include every line. 

I use this to project onto the wall so that I can get an accurate drawing up as quickly as possible.

Do you think it's cheating to use a project?

7) Get painting!

Now all that’s left is prepping the wall and putting the brush strokes down. 

For this mural, I started by adding a protective 2 layers of MuralShield directly to the wall to create a moisture barrier and give the paint something nice to grip onto. 

After that, I put down 2 coats of Kilz 2 primer.

Next, I went down to the wall in the evening so that I could see my projector and threw up the outlines.

Finally, it was time to paint. Weather was a big factor in painting this mural. The first weekend of painting got ruined a bit by the heat. Saturday and Sunday were 108°F, meaning I could only paint from 7:30 to 12:30. After that, the wall got too hot and the paint started acting funny. So I chipped away over a few more evenings and then a long 10 hour day for the final push.

 

Gratitude and More

A big shoutout to T-Mobile for providing this opportunity – a wall to unleash my creativity. A special thanks to Robert for his support throughout the project. The security team also deserves a round of applause for ensuring a seamless experience getting in and out of the building.

The T-Mobile office was a sight to behold. A blend of corporate sophistication and creative freedom.

So there we have it! Each project is a new chapter in my journey of art. I paint, I learn, and I share, all while having a laugh or two along the way. Stay tuned for more.

Happy creating!
Chris
@hatefulcrawdad