Transcripts
1. Intro | Class Trailer!: Hi. Welcome to this class. Using the framework of murals, I want to show you how you can use Procreate to bridge the digital and analog worlds to your advantage. In this class, you'll learn how to take a reference photo, place it into the app, design on top of it so you have a final reference file, for when you are ready to put it into a real-world context. It's great both for beginners to digital painting, and also for people who are looking for new approaches to their projects. My name is Mimi, and I focus on illustration and design work. My SkillShare classes have focused on topics such as drawing on photography, how to use Procreate, and making your own illustrated journal. What I like to do is take digital tools and find new ways to approach traditional media, and this class is no exception. Recently, I started to do many large scale murals, and even though it's such a physical real-world exercise, using digital tools is actually a huge part of my process. I started out as a digital artist and translated it into large scale murals, and at first it was this very intimidating process. When I started out, I didn't really find that many video tutorials on how to best do it, which is another reason why I really wanted to create this class. I will show you how I started with the planning and design side on an app like Procreate, and then the materials that I found were most helpful as I translated that onto a real wall. Whether you're trying to find a new way to use a digital drawing app such as Procreate, or figure out how to get your own mural onto a wall, this class will definitely have something helpful for you. Let's get started.
2. 01 | What You'll Learn: So what are we going to learn in this class? I'm going to show you my mural process from start to finish. That means starting in a digital app such as Procreate and using a reference photo to drop it in here and draw on top of it to reach our final design. If you're unfamiliar with how to use Procreate, I actually have another Skillshare class showing you just that. I highly recommend taking it if you want to be a little bit more comfortable before starting this class. Once we're done designing our mural in the app, we're going to set that aside and then move into the real world where I'll show you my favorite mural painting tools. Starting with obvious things such as brushes, which paints I like to use, and going through a little bit about how to pick colors. I'll also give you some less expected tips on things that I've found to be really helpful as I was painting my murals. Just to be clear, the point of this class is not to show you how to draw this exact mural design. Rather, I'm going to show you my thinking and design process, then introduce you to the techniques and the tools I use to paint the mural on the wall. By the end of the class, you should have a good idea of how to take your own design, place it in the context of a real world setting, and even paint the mural itself. If you're not an experienced artists, don't worry, but start simple. Take basic shapes and start from there. Let's get started.
3. 02 | Designing Digital-First with Procreate: Most of you by now are very well aware that Procreate is this amazing digital drawing app. Of course, people use it to create these great illustrations and great paintings, and obviously I use it for myself for that as well. For those of you who don't use Photoshop, Procreate, and all of these digital drawing apps are also just great for photo manipulation and incorporating or merging your digital media with photography that you take in real life. That's what I really want to show you through this class as well. I've taken a photo of the wall that I want to paint the mural on. I'm going to use that for reference when I'm designing the mural itself. Besides a mural, obviously it could be anything that you're working on. Whether you wanted to create a design for a mug or a print or anything physical, you can take a photo of that, drop it into the app and the same process applies. But again, we're just using the mural as a framework here. I'm going to drop it to the iPad. One thing that I want to emphasize is that the photo itself ideally should be really flat and straight on. An easy way to check that is just to make sure that the side of the wall is perfectly parallel to the side of the photograph. This will just help prevent any distortion or warping when you're designing on top of it. When you're taking the photo, I would take it both with and without the furniture that you have in mind. This is a mural that I did for a client and it was going into their lobby office space. Normally I would design the mural itself, just on it like Canvas, and it looks great by itself. But if you think about it, there's going to be a sofa that needs to go in front of it or some plants or whatever it is, so it's great to actually plan around that. You wouldn't want to put something that's super-critical, that's going to end up getting covered. Sometimes you might even plan about how it might interact with a physical object in the room or if you know that there's going to be, let's say a chair, that's in front the mural. You can think about how I might be cute if there was something sticking out of it. It looks like it was all planned and designed around each other. In this example, this is how the full mural loads on top of the furniture. I'll go more into this design as we get into the next class. But this is a quick way to show you that you need to consider the furniture as well. I just have it on a separate layer, adjust the furniture so I can pop it in and out and quickly assess like, okay, it looks great with the furniture and without it, if we ever decide to move the furniture, it still all works. Once you're in the actual app itself, what I really like about designing with the digital app first is just how much you can experiment and adjust without having to test paints on an actual wall or going out and adjusting or buying new tools to try new things. You can really solidify the design and look and feel on the app, and then move into the real world. I really find that for me, at least it cut down on a lot of back and forth. Just as a quick refresher, I had a layer started here already. But what it is, is when you just hit this Plus button, you can add as many layers as you like and you can also group them and turn them on and off. What's great about that is that you can create many different designs for your wall mural or whatever it is that you're designing and just keep experimenting. By not touching the actual photograph layer itself underneath, you can keep undoing basically until you get to the final result, which you'll find it's going to be really helpful, especially if you're working with a client and you need to go back and forth on different approaches. Besides layers, I think another very helpful aspect is all the adjustments that you can do in the app. For example, I had started with this coral orange brushstroke. Say, I'm just going to draw some really quick shapes just to show you what I mean. Then we'll create another circle with say, this gray color right here, and let's do some nice dashes beneath it. You will see I'm doing this all on different layers. That's just to keep everything really organized and really clean. I'll talk a little bit about picking color palettes later on. But this is purely just to show you how I use the adjustment features to my benefit when designing. Say, I'm starting to go towards either the shape or color palette and I'm curious what it might look like as different colors. By selecting a layer that I want and just hitting this adjustment function and going to hue saturation and brightness, I can play with that and see, well, what if this blue streak was a little bit more pink or red or on the opposite, more green and yellow so as you can start to see that this would be really helpful versus having to paint a swatch on the wall, see how it looks, and then painting again with a different paint color and keep trying to iterate that in the real world. In the digital world, is a lot cleaner and a lot faster. Same thing here and I'm like, oh, it's a little bit to saturate actually, I want maybe more of a gray tone and that's starting to look really good to me and see whether something really dark or lighter would help. Say this orange one is like a little bit too saturated and I'm also not sure, maybe another color would actually be better. Then I desaturate that a little bit, maybe bring it down. Yeah, I like how those two work together. Another nice aspect of using a digital app which is Procreate, is that you can use all the different effect layers. Say for example, on this gray circle, I'm curious what will be the effect if I multiplied it with the circle beneath it and I actually really like that. Obviously, you can't do that with paint and you can't just take a layer of paint and say, like hey multiply and it affects it. But then you can start to plan your colors around this effect. Now, I know, I need these three colors, this gray color, this orange color, and this new color that was created digitally, but I can recreate the look and feel of using paint. Those are actually the key things that I use this the most for and when I go into the designing of the mural, I'll show you how to use a few other tools such as warp and perspective so that I can see how the design might look like from an angle. But for now I think this is a great place to take a pause and take the photo that you need for your design. Import into the app. Start setting up your layers and experimenting with colors. Then when we meet in the next class we will go into how I designed the actual mural for the space itself. I'll see you there.
4. 03 | Designing Your Mural: Let's get into the design of the mural itself. Professional art muraling is something that takes years to master and is obviously something that I don't want to downplay here and I really admire personally. But on the other hand, I really want to encourage people who just want to get something up on their own walls to not be too intimidated because there really is a way to simplify it and make it work for you and that's what I'm going to show you here. Let's just keep that in mind as we're designing the mural and I'll walk you through some of my thinking process, both in past client work and also for the mural for this class. When we're thinking about inspiration on what the mural can be, I really start with what I want the mural to do and the effect I want it to have on the space. I would say that that's the key part in anything that you're designing, the context and the reason why. For example, in a client piece, it might be something that needs to convey a message that the company wants to communicate to the people who are going to see the message. If it's for yourself, you might think more about mood such as I want this mural to calm me or relax me, or I want it to inspire me and energize me. Starting with that why is a great guide post and then you can go into the visuals. I think Pinterest is obviously great for this. I go on there, browse around, look at related pins, and start to create a mood board of inspirations and ideas and it doesn't have to be literally other art murals. It could be a print that you really like or a fabric which has a great pattern, or a travel photography that has some element in it that you really want to capture in the mural that you're doing. Another great place to start is obviously, if you live in a neighborhood that has art murals or restaurants that have cool walls, just to take a look at what's out there and get some ideas from what other people have done. What's great about that is that you get more of a sense of space and scale, so you start to see what things really work in a room setting versus say if it was a smaller print on a wall and I think that's actually really critical and getting the design of the mural right for your space. Let's talk about some more concrete examples of that. Recently, I worked on a mural for a hotel and it was going to be in their People & Culture offices. What they really wanted to do was one, liven up the space, make it feel more welcoming and friendly, and two, also create a unifying message so when people walk in, they know immediately what that office is about or that company culture is and people can start to rally behind that. It's this abstract concept that needed to be distilled into a mural. They were showing me a lot of these great inspirational lettering type murals that have flowers coming out of it and likely that you've seen something like this before. I showed them some examples of what that would look like in their space and it was like what they had seen and thought that they liked, but when they saw it in the context of the room itself and how the furniture would look with it, they decided that was actually not what they wanted to do. After we did that exercise, I took their feedback and did another direction that I thought they might like, which is to expand some of the floral and decorative elements out to the edges of the wall. It felt more immersive because another aspect that they really want was that when people walked in, they felt like they were walking into a space or a scene almost and it could be a little bit of a transporting feeling. We did that approach and they liked that aspect of it, but then decided that the colors were a little bit too somber for them or it wasn't quite as lively as they really wanted it to be. So taking that feedback, I've thought a lot about how can I incorporate their company culture, the liveliness that they wanted and immersiveness of the feeling of the drawing that they liked into one final design. That's where I ended up with actually something that wasn't really similar to anything that they had shown me, but incorporated elements, whether it was a feeling, a visual cue, or a color palette of all the different things that we talked about into one final design and actually I think that's the most exciting part of this design process. At the end, they went with this and they were really happy with it. What I think is successful about it is that, at once incorporates all of the aspects they like of other people's work, but really felt like something that they could own themselves. Really reflected the hotel's environment, the company culture, and it felt different enough so they could really say this was something that was custom for us. At the end of the day, you want to think about for your own space or the project that you're working on, how can you make this achieve the feeling or the mood that you really want it to be? Taking all of that and putting it in context of the project for this class, it's a little bit different because this is in my personal space and I really wanted to use a smaller wall so that it felt a little bit more accessible and also something that's personal, so I can really think about what I would do if I had free rein. In terms of this wall, it's situated in a place which is this industrial warehouse loft. It has concrete floors, high ceilings, exposed pipes, and I wanted it to feel feminine in a reflective of my style but also match the environment that it's in because it was just important for me personally. I've already obviously designed a mural ahead of time so that I can talk through it. I can show you some of the processes and some of the previous sketches that I did, and how I arrived at this final design. I have a lot of other illustrations that I'm working on at the same time. There are certain pieces I had been working on and I knew I wanted to same feeling of in the design. This is one example that I had as a reference on the side. I liked the color schemes, the gray with a pop of bold orange, yellow as a contrast and then these wavy shapes that feel dreamy to me, but are graphics so it doesn't feel too childlike. It could be partly because I was watching these great nature documentaries at the same time and there are these ocean episodes with this really beautiful sea kelp that's floating in the water. I've always been really attracted to how that looks and feels and because this has this cool vertical space, I thought this could be a really interesting way to tie that in. I started to draw in these lines going around the outlets and thinking about how to use this space so that I feel like I'm walking past this forest of sea kelp but interpretive, I don't want it to be too literal. If I had started with just a blank canvas, I wouldn't have realized or considered that there is this really tall and narrow perspective that would blend itself to certain types of placements. A lot of it has to do with the composition of how you want to design your mural as well. Things like I could've accidentally placed something really important right around the outlet and then it's distracting versus now I can think about, okay, like where is my eye really being led to? I feel like this is a key spot and this is a key spot, now I'll be looking at this area all the time. Then as I started to design more out of that, I ended up at this small little design right here. I added a few little silhouettes because a lot of my work involves characters, and I wanted to reflect that but not in a way that was too large. So I had these little silhouettes that were playing around and it creates this immersive atmosphere and then I realized that I still wanted something a little bit more of a storytelling, like it's bringing in another character in a way that will still tie in with everything else and so I had been working on this drawing as well totally separately, but I had a similar feeling of being immersed in these floating plants and it's a little bit surreal and dreamy. Obviously wasn't at the right aspect ratio, but how can I take something I like about that and incorporate it into the drawing here? That's where I got the idea of having maybe a figure being posed here. Maybe taking up the space would actually be very fitting. It has this nice surrounding where it's encapsulated by the confines of this wall. Then her hair length itself to the seaweeds shapes that I had already been drawing. You can see how all of these things come together and it'll be different in your experience. If you're just more learning how to paint them your self like take this design or anything else that I've shown in any of the other classes and interpret that onto your own walls. This was the design that I ended up with. Is still in the sketch stage, but it gives you a good sense of what that mural is going to appear like on the wall. A lot of it is really just colors and composition. How did I arrive at this color palette? It wasn't that I immediately knew right away that I wanted to have this dark took color with these bright pops up orange. But I did know that I wanted to feel soothing a little bit on the darker side, something that would feel nice for a place to relax and be able to emphasize that dreamy, surreal, but still positive and warm and comforting feeling. I played around with several different colors before landing on this taupe color. I originally had this richer darker blue purple, but it felt still a little bit cold to me. As I was looking at the rest of the apartment, I thought that I wanted to match the woods and the grays and the concrete for a little bit more. You can just hit that layer and then in procreate, you would just go to the adjustment here saturation and brightness section. Then you can move this around until you get to a point where you are like, "Okay, I like that". I would think about it and you can go and read more on color theory, but I would think about it in general as blues and purples are calming, they especially you get to the cooler tones is going to feel a little bit more dark. Then getting into the reds it's a little bit more warm, is a little bit more soothing. Green is a popular color for a feeling like a calming sense of energy especially depending on what saturation you do. But since it's the color of nature, a lot of people like looking at green for relaxing and then yellows and oranges, I would say in general, are great for of energizing moods. Then for me, I like to have a little bit more of a desaturated color but I'm moving away from things that are purely gray or black because I feel like it's not quite the right feeling for a living space where I still want people to feel invited and comfortable. I was in purplish, reddish, bluish hue, and then I played with the saturation. Obviously the more saturated you get, the more energetic is going to feel, and the more desaturated, I would say more modern, a little more mature feeling, but it could feel a little too somber depending on what mood you wanted to get out of your mural. I have the final color that I set. Here we're just purplish top color, and from there I knew that I wanted to have some pops of contrast. I started with the orange actually. I now wanted a little bit of orange to bring something that's felt energetic, little bit bright, but not overwhelming so I kept it very minimal. I got toward to a point actually that was around here and it didn't have the black streaks in it yet, and I still wanted to bring in something else. For me personally, I really like the contrast of a really dark color with a brighter color. I think there's this whole theme of light and dark that I often like to explore, so that's why I brought in this really deep, almost black purple gray. On the one hand added some shadow to her as a human figure, and then also balance it out with some streaks at the top. I would say that something to consider is just when you're picking your colors and cleaning this up, you'll want to keep in mind that is really hard actually to achieve that multiply transparent layered look. Here this is a great example of something I mentioned earlier where I have this circle that is actually this color. Using something that I can really only do in a digital app, I hit the multiply effect and then it created this interesting design around this top part. I like to overlap with the arch. I like the effect is having with the lighter orange circle underneath it. What's going to be tricky is how to incorporate when it starts really overlap and keeping that really cohesive. You can think about moving it around. Again this is what's really great about starting design in the digital world. I can be like, "Is it better and move it down here. Should I keep it up here like move it a little bit out of the way so that there's there is cleaner sections of color." The way I achieve this multiplied effect is to just actually look at the actual final color that's produced, and match my paint to that because obviously I can't paint a circle and then decide to multiply it onto my wall. Then same thing with this bottom circle. I had also experimented with multiplying it or using other effects, but ultimately decided that I liked how it echoed the top, what I would call the moon and the situation. Then I just made it a little bit smaller and moved it to a place that I felt like compositionally looked good, but also was where her heart would be and liking that as a symbolic metaphor that I would probably only know at that point. We're happy with how the wall is looking in the forward facing reference photo that we've done. One other thing that I think is useful and to take advantage of in these apps, is that you can actually now take this design that you've created and use the warping and prospective tools to make sure you like how it looks from different angles. I'll just show you a quick example of that, and you can imagine how it would be useful. If you want to say see how, then we all feel as you're entering the room or if you're seeing from the kitchen, or laying in bed and things like that. I have inserted in here a photo that I took that is from an angle where I feel I'll see this mural a lot. Then what you would do is actually just the hold the top corners of these blue circles and warp it a little bit, change the perspective. Now you can imagine this is what it will look like when I enter from the doorway or the entry way and make sure you still like how that looks and how it ties in with the rest of the room. What I'm working with the larger-scale projects, I actually like to take the final digital design file and project it onto the wall and create the trace of the drawing from there. It's just a lot more efficient and a lot quicker than gridding out the wall and then slowly penciling it in from there. But since I have the small wall that I'm using for this project, I can use it as an opportunity to show you how you would pencil it out if say, you either don't have a projector or you want to experiment using the grid method. Now that we're happy with how the design is looking, why don't we meet in the next class where I'll show you my painting materials and some suggestions on how to prep for your wall for the mural. I'll see you there.
5. 04 | Prepping To Paint Your Design: I'm going to walk you through the typical materials that I use for a painting mural. This was after a lot of research from my first mural and then whittling it down to what I really found to be super useful for the second mural. To start off on the brush aside, people actually really surprised that I do the vast majority of my mural with just these very standard painters brushes that you can get at any Home Depot. I'm not really using artist brushes for the most part, especially this as a larger space. I use these wide angled brushes that have pretty stiff control for painting. Anything that's a huge swath of color for that, I would use a roller. There's the smaller rollers that are good for corners and smaller spaces, and then I would just use the foot-long ones to cover a large swath. These longer ones are good for longer, bigger brush strokes, and they have these short handled ones that are a little bit more controlled. When it comes to more fine details really goes when there's these thinner light lions strokes that I knew were going to be a little bit of a challenge. I can get the same idea but with an actual painters brush so this one is made by a Princeton and it's called the Catalyst line, and I think it's really nice. It has these stiff precious, there's theistic and really able to control a fine line and kind of push down where I went a little bit thicker, I'm going to lift that up when I wanted to be a little bit thinner. Then the same idea again on just slightly take even tinier version for the super detailed work. From there I would say actually this microfiber towel is really helpful. At Home Depot we can get a huge pack of these. I think maybe 12 comes in a packet of for $8. They're really affordable and just super handy for the clean-ups, wiping off brushes. One thing I really like using it is I can actually erase it. House paint is surprisingly forgiving those. The first pleasant surprise that I learned when I was making the murals. These microfiber towels are just really great for many different uses. I try get paint as close to my color palette as possible, but I've found that four to five times, I still need a mix a little bit to create the true color that I really want. If I know I'm going to use it right away and don't need to save it. A muffin pan is actually really helpful for them. Is like this is the perfect size of enlarge color palette. But I know that when save there, it makes a little bit more. What I'll do is I'll put them in these simpler containers and especially with the larger murals, I'm doing them over the course of a few days so it's way better to mix a lot of front and then have it ready to go later on rather than try to run out. Then you had to figure out how you recreated that and it doesn't always match up perfectly. I highly recommend these containers. First tip is painter's tape. It is a little bit better, sometimes with cheaper painter's tape when you pull it off there is a little bit of bleed that gets through. It's not always a perfect line. You lessen that if you get this type of Pinterest state, the next thing I want to get into is the paint itself. I actually had purchased a lot of Golden brand acrylics from our first mural and didn't really end up using any of it because I used almost entirely this bear house paint. They are made for walls. They go on super smooth and as I mentioned, they're really easy to wipe off and I think that's a huge perk. These little containers are about $3 to $4 and they really go along way. I would say other than the base main background color, I only really get them in this size and if I know I need a little bit more I'll get two. In terms of the actual type of finish, you can go to your Home Depot and get these little gray cards or asked for. I use that eggshell animal I think it's the perfect middle ground for everything. One you'll be able to see how it will actually come up. You'll see flat is always alum or mat and then glass it's very shiny, and on the back, it gives you a little bit of a guide on what each one is good for. The glassier it gets basically the more durable it is. If you know it's going to get a lot of water on a or a lot of little sticky hands and touching it, then you're going to go glossier. But I personally like the look of a glassier mural so then you might go flat, but then flat is really easy to get dirty, a little bit hard to keep clean. That's why I find that the eggshell animal has has been the perfect middle ground for me. That said, this paints section at the Home Depot is also great for picking up these little pink cards. These are all free to take and it's great to build out your color palette. A lot of times what I will do is finish the design digitally and then bring it with me on my phone to Home Depot. I just pick out the closest colors and then these were the colors that I ended up picking for this murals. I sampled a bunch of these. A lot of times what's tricky is that something that might look one way on the card or in your drawing is going to look different in the environment. Especially if say you have a darker room or the tone of the lighting. Lighting really affects the outcome of how the mural looks. I would really recommend choosing a range like maybe what you think is the best. Then given the tone of your lighting, whether it's cool lighting or warm lighting, just adjust it to balance it out. For me personally, I knew I wanted this warm gray, but I wasn't sure how purple versus blue to go or desaturated to go so I pick their range of something more on the purple side and the sums that were truly gray and tested little swatches of them on the wall. At the end of the day, seeing it under the light, seeing it in person, I decided that the more purple versions of the color that I thought I wanted actually turned out the best. The last thing actually that I wanted to show you really quick was slow trawl. This is really great for extending the pain because she doesn't dry out too fast and really goes on very smoothly. One little can of this goes along way and is called fled float trial, and it's in the same aisle as all of this stuff. There's a few more things that I'll list out in the class description and in the guide that I'm going to provide, I hope that is helpful. The next section, I'm going to go into actually prepping the wall to get them mural up. I'll see you there.
6. 05 | Painting Your Mural Design: So now let's talk about actually painting. Before my first day of painting, I actually do some color swatches to test on a part of a wall that will get covered up. Since paint goes on lighter than it dries and since lighting can affect how paint looks in a room, this helps me get a true gauge of what paint colors I'm working with. It can get tricky to pick sometimes, like all of these great top shades I have here. But by comparing it next to my digital design, I can pick the one that is closest to my drawing. It's worth re emphasizing here that the paint will dry darker than it initially goes on.This is especially true when you're trying to add just a subtle shadow onto an existing dried color, that shadow color is going to look almost exactly the same as your dried color but that makes sense because it's going on lighter, so just have faith and confidence in your test swatches so that you don't make colors darker than necessary. Now that we have our test colors swatches ready, we want to prep the area by covering the floor with some sort of drop cloth and taping it off with painters tape.This is especially a big deal if you have the floor that isn't as easy to clean up in case paint gets on it. We'll also clean up the wall of any dust and debris so we don't have to worry about bumps later on. If you're working with the clean interior wall, this should be pretty quick. If you're working at outdoor or rougher wall, there maybe some more prep work involved. Now, let's get the actual design penciled onto the wall. In the past, I always used a digital projector. I like it because it's quick to chase a design onto the wall and I can keep projecting as I cover up the lines and need to draw the next top layers on top of it. But sometimes it's not possible to use a projector or not easy to and that was the case with this wall. I remember that with the hotel mural I almost had the same problem. We had to put the projector outside of a doorway and fortunately, it wasn't blocked by something else. But in the instances where you can't use a projector, you can rely on the traditional good method. That means you simply grid out your digital design and map it onto the wall manually. It is slower and more tedious, but I actually found that it had some pros. It forced me to be more resourceful when it came to painting over the lines. I was a little more thoughtful and careful about what I painted over, which actually led to a better finished design because I wasn't painting unnecessary layers. To create my guide, I just used procreates built-in drawing guide. You just go to the settings and turn on the guide. Since I knew that my wall was 80 inches tall, I split up my design into eight squares, so I knew that each one was 10 inches tall and 10 inches wide. I then drew a grid onto the wall that matched this drawing. I knew that I could follow the grid by drawing on my design and that it would match perfectly. I personally like to use a Prismacolour color erase blue when drawing my lines onto a wall. I like that it draws a lighter line than a graphite pencil. An extra bonus is that it comes off easily with just some water on a microfiber towel. If you had outlets on your wall like I do, it's best to take them off, tape it off, paint them if you want to and put them back on. It's really up to you, for me since this was a personal space, I decided I would just paint right over it. In case you're wondering, my lights continue to work just fine. The zip lock containers are one of my favorite things. I really like the size of the mouth because the smaller sample paint containers are little tiny for the paint brushes that I use so I like to transfer my paint from the sample can into this zip lock container and brush from there. It's also what I use to mix and save custom colors. I'm going to take this gray and say I wanted to make it a little warmer. I have this nice orangey color called the frosted seeds and I'll mix it in and warm up this gray. I like these really affordable mixing sticks that are available at home depot. They're basically like big version of those craft sticks you used to use when you're a kid in school, and they're really great for mixing the colors together. Mixing them together, I get this much warmer gray and I'll be able to use that for later. For now, I'll pop the lid back on and save it. I like to label each one and I highly recommend that you do so too. This is really important to me, especially as I start to get into the final stages where I'm mixing many shades of the same color say a slight highlight and a slight shadow color. I'll mark this one top corner gray, and this one I'll call being top. Let's start with this paint it's called Metropolis. I chose this paint as the base because I like that it has this mature modern tone that grays often give a space. But because it has this purple tin is still feels warm and inviting, which is the overall feeling that I wanted for this wall.This is Floetrol, the paint extender I mentioned earlier. I want to show you what it looks like. It comes out as white, but remember it doesn't lighten the pink color and it does thin it out. You'll want to experiment with how much you need. I personally find that I just need a little bit to get the paint feeling smooth and prevent it from getting gunky as I leave it out. But not so much that it loses its opacity. When it comes to prepping the base layer, you want to make sure that your base layer paint is very opaque. If you want to look of having some paint coming through, that is a style as well. I personally knew that this would be eventually covered up by the deep top layer that I have in my design. I didn't worry too much about having the base layer not completely covering it up down here. But in the top corner where I knew it was going to show through, I made sure that it was really opaque. To get started, let's start with getting this big piece colored in. When using the roller brush, you want to roll it so you get a nice even coat and make sure that it's not dripping with paint. A quick tip with these roller brushes, you can use an x movement when painting on the paint to avoid lines. You'll find that if you do just straight horizontal and vertical lines that you'll start seeing these lines from the edge of the roller. But using an X, you can smooth all of those lines out, and watch out for air pockets which will eventually pop and leave and an uncovered portion of paint. Of course, you can always cover that up later as long as you still have some remaining paint, which I will recommend you do for all colors until you have finished the wall. You'll see this really satisfying to get this smooth color on. Even if you have some texture underneath, which I have here for my old mural, it's totally fine. I think it adds to the charm. If you do need to do some clean and sharp edges, such as a mountain motif or chevrons, I'm sure most of you already know, but you can use painters tape to get those edges with this paint roller. You want to line it up and make sure it's really tight on the line that you want. Pass it down so there is no air bubbles, especially along the edges you want to make sure that no paint can seep under the tape because that would really defeats its purpose. Once you make sure that it's properly on the wall, you can paint directly on top of it and not worry about the edges. Just make sure the tape goes on dry paint and it's not removed and that the paint on top is also dry. The paint looks dry enough for us to remove the tape. Let's see how it looks. I think that looks really good. As you can see using the painters [inaudible] it can get you some really nice clean lines with very minimal effort. When I first started painting murals, I got a bunch of brushes to try. But I found in practice was that I used the angled brush a lot more and had a lot more control with it. I liked that I could get a lot of coverage, but also have more control than with the roller brushes. I found that there wasn't anything I couldn't do with this angled brush that I could do with the flat brushes, but the reverse wasn't true. Say I want to draw a big leaf, which is a lot of what I do. I can paint it quite easily with this brush, even though it might look quite big and wierdly at first, actually gets these really nice clean lines. Now let's try the next size, smaller brush that I have for the angled brushes. Again, since they're not cheap, I would personally recommend just getting one larger size and one smaller size. I found that that was all I really needed in terms of this kind of brush. These brushes come with long handles or short handles. I personally like the long handles of these brushes because it's comfortable for my hand and while the shorter ones technically give you more control, I found that they weren't as comfortable to use for long periods of time. The last brush we'll go over is this painters brush I got just last week. I didn't have a brush like this on my last mural but remember that when I was working on it, that I wish that I had one more stiffed but slightly more refined brush for that last bit of detailing. The brushes I was going over earlier are great. But the main issue was getting the tips just right. It was more challenging with those house painting brushes. I had to do a lot more detailing with say, the microfiber towel and a combination of painting lines over it or another color on top and I knew that there was a brush out there that could just make this a lot more quick of a process. It still has that stiff brush, but it has a lot of control of a smaller artist brush. I can tell just from testing it that is going to work great for what I want. I can get these light strokes and also thicken it with some pressure. I mentioned earlier that I really like using house paint because it's really easy to wipe off and I can show you that now. All I do is I take out microfiber towel, dip it in some water, mixture is not too drippy or else water will leak down which we don't want. Then just take the towel and wipe off the edge of the paint. It gives us very clean line. You can think of it as an eraser, but remember you have to do it relatively quickly once the paint dries, it doesn't work anymore. A quick note about washing brushes. I will say for proper brush care, you should wash your brushes right away if possible. When I first started painting, I wasn't that great about it. If your paint dries it's really hard to clean it off and it does damage the brush or what I was doing was leaving it brush side down in my water cans and then it will get bent out of shape and it really wasn't really salvageable, if I left it like that for too long. For this sample project, I was very good about cleaning my brushes after every painting session. What I would do is I would clean the brushes as much as I could as I was painting with water and lay it flat to dry. I didn't leave it in the water bucket if I could help it. Those are my basic tips for the types of brushstrokes that I tend to use when painting murals. Now I will show you a quick timer so you can see the whole process from start to finish. As we get into the actual painting, I want to share some tips I've learned since starting as a beginner and getting a little more comfortable with the process over the course of four murals. Coming from a digital painting background, it's interesting to think about how that translates with this physical world painting, I still paint in layers. I think when you're just starting out, you might think that I paints this design just as you see it. I paint the girl, I paint the cub, I paint the moon. But actually I paint in layers just like I've setup my digital painting. I really like the smooth lines this gives me. I paint the big shapes all the way through in the back and then one by one layer on the colors in a logical way. To get those smooth lines, I recommend that you paint with your whole arm, not your wrist. This gives you so smooth controlled lines. The stiff brush of course helps too. My last tip is just to take care of yourself. I will say that painting a large mural requires a lot of energy and it can make you tired and sore, especially if you're not used to a lot of physical activity like squatting and stretching for long periods of time, stretch and take breaks as needed. That covers my main beginner tips. I'm excited to see how it turns out.
7. 06 | Final Thoughts: You've made it to the end of the class. I hope it was helpful to see the whole process from start to finish, and how to utilize digital design apps to create efficient processes for real-world results. Whether you decide to create a mural or not, I hope you take some helpful tips from this class and make your own design processes more efficient and effective. I would also love to see any designs you've made by uploading them to the class projects. Don't forget, they can find all the tips and tools that I mentioned in this class summarized in the class description below. I hope you'll join me in my next class. Until then, happy creating. Bye.
Mimi Chao, Owner & Illustrator | Mimochai
