Stenciling 101

Lesson 4: Stenciling Situations

Walls IV - Murals

Murals are impressive to all who see them – and fun. They can actually be easier than a border or frame, simply because you rarely need to do any measuring. You simply choose the elements that you want to include in your mural, decide where they want to go, and begin. The nice thing is that you can add to them one element atr a time until you are satisfied – or decide to keep them quite simple. A sky, a couple of birds and a birdbath constitute a good but simple mural. The sky and flying birds you see here are the main elements in a mrual that goes the entire length of a staircase. Very simple. But you can go whole hog and create a garden full of flowers and trees and animals just as easily, or an indoor scene.

It's a good idea to make a rough plan on paper before you start, indicating where the major elements belong. Last year I decided to do a couple of giant columns framing an Italian scene – a gazebo, path, and a few different trees. If I had done a plan, I would have placed the Italian scene much higher on the wall than I did – as it turned out the columns had to be a lot higher that I wanted to make the perspective look right. But don't worry about the minor elements. If you are doing a garden scene, for instance, you may have a few major elements – a gate or fence, a path, a tree, maybe a birdbath – and flowers and perhaps a few birds, insects and critters like rabbits and chipmunks. The path, gate, tree and birdbath are major elements. You will have to decide whether you want flowers in front of the fence, behind it, or both. The path will need to relate in some meaningful way to the gate, and the tree, being an extremely large element of the design, will need to be placed carefully for balance. But placing the individual flowers and animals is an individual choice. You can add some now, and 6 months later find a new flower stencil, or a particularly appealing bird, and add it later.I "finished this tree months ago, but found a great bird stencil and added it months later - and then got the idea of going 3-dimensional and so cut little apples from the crafts store in half and glued them to the wall as though they were growing from the branches, and added half a nest with some little baby birds sitting in it. Later I added a few elements at the bottom of the stencil - most notably a freshly hatched duckling emerging from an egg. I figured I needed to see what all those birds were flying down the staircase to see. A huge egg seemingly falling from that little nest seemed to explain the commotion.

But other than that, a mural is simply stenciling with several different stencils in a way that makes them form a picture.

One thing that makes a mural realistic is a fitting background. You could create a garden on a plain white wall – but it would be more striking and convincing if you painted it against a background of sky and earth. Or perhaps your elements would look best against a stone or brick wall. (This gives you the opportunity to experiment a lot with shadowing.) If you are doing an indoor scene, you may be able to get away with using the wall that your house already has – or you may want to change the color or give it some texture to set it apart from the other, plainer walls in the room.

Backgrounds may sound daunting, but are actually fairly easy and surprisingly quick to do. I'll give you instructions for a sky and a stone wall. The stone can become brick by simply changing the spacing. If you want something more sophisticated, you will want to check out our course on Faux Painting.

Sky and Ground Background The key to making this convincing is to first decide where your horizon line should be. In other words, where do you want the sky to meet the earth? And is your horizon straight and level, or somewhat hilly? I find that even a slightly rolling line here looks more convincing than a straight horizon.

Your sky should have its deepest colors at ceiling level, and get progressively lighter as you get to the horizon. The earth is deepest at the floor or baseboard and fades to nothing as it meets the sky. Notice how the sky here fades away to nothing, and then the earth area goes from pale to deepest at the bottom? This is easy to accomplish with a sea sponge, some green, blue and white paint, and a bottle of transparent glazing liquid. (If you're doing a very large mural you may want a bucket of the glaze. It's wonderful stuff. I find that adding a bit of it to my acrylics allows me to blend them easily and seamlessly, which is otherwise impossible, since acrylics otherwise have such a fast dry time.)

Begin by adding just a few drops of blue paint to the glaze. I find that a large wall – 9' high by about 10' long takes me about a cup of glaze for the sky portion, assuming that I have a wall with 2/3 sky and 1/3 land. Keep track of the amount of paint you add by using measuring spoons in case you need to mix up more.

Mix well and then sponge a wavy line slightly above your horizon line. If you want a really solid sky you can use a soft bristled brush to do this, but I find that I have more control with the sponge and can always sponge twice if I want a more solid effect.

Now add a bit more blue – enough that you can see a difference in the glaze color – and sponge an top of the palest line. You can make this area a bit wider than your first. Keep adding blue to deepen the glaze until you reach the top.

If it's not dark enough at the top, work your way back down, in reverse, adding enough color to get the depth you want, and thinning the color with glaze and white paint to make it paler as it nears the horizon.

Do the same at the bottom, using green paint – or brown if you want the look of bare earth.

On the ground, you can then sponge in some slightly deeper "hills" or curved lines to indicate that the earth is rolling slightly. You can add a path if you like (there are some excellent stencils out there for stone paths,) or you can create your own. First, draw the path shape, starting wide nearest the bottom, and curving and narrowing to a close as it nears the horizon. You may want to paint this area with gray paint to simulate grout or dry earth. Freehand in stone shapes, starting with large ones in a wide area getting smaller as the path narrows that the horizon. Sponge these with some brown paint and then some gray for a stone effect. Make sure that your path ends on the painted ground area and doesn't float up into the sky a bit.If you want it to be a long path, make it curve a lot instead of extending away from the ground.

If you want sky with clouds, you have a couple of options. There are some cloud stencils available to make your efforts relatively foolproof – but be aware that then you will end up with a lot of identical clouds. You can also use white paint and your sea sponge. Apply some white paint with a damp sponge, going in a horizontal direction and dragging the sponge slightly, as opposed to the usual lift and pounce motion. Then add a bit of glaze and pounce it on to build up your cloud shape. Finally, sponge in a bit of pale gray to create a bit of shadowing in the cloud shape. Keep them fairly transparent and you really can't go too wrong.

This is the advantage to the sea sponge technique. Your sky already has a "broken finish." If you sponge on clouds they will appear as lighter, whiter areas of that finish – an illusion of clouds. It's hard to make any serious mistakes with that! The clouds in this sky are really only suggestions of cloud shapes done in nearly transparent white paint - but they read to the eye as clouds.

Now add a couple of flying birds, if you like, and start stenciling in your main elements. Just remember to keep anything that is supposed to be on the ground in contact with the earth.

HINT: If you find that you need to stencil in something that is paler than the background behind it, or if you want to stencil something in front of an area already stenciled in a dark color, first stencil the shape in white, and then go over it again in the appropriate color. This will keep any background from showing through. This is also a great technique for erasing any mistakes you make. In a mural you often overlap elements – a flower in front of a fence, or a bird on a leafy branch, so you may discover that this technique comes in handy more than once.

Stone Wall
For this you need a level, a book about the size of the stone you want, and a roll of quilter's tape which comes in ¼" thickness. It's a good idea to first paint the wall grout gray. That way when you remove the masking we're about to do, your grout lines will already look realistic. This will also take care of any problems you have with walls that are an unrealistic color for stone – bright green or blue can look really odd coming through the stone.

Establish a baseline using a carpenter's level and draw in a guideline. Now, place your book on the guideline and mark off the shape with a pencil. To get a realistic you may want to start with a half book shape and work from there. That way your next row can begin with a full book shape, producing the staggered pattern in which most stones and bricks are laid. Continue to do this until you have your wall covered with a penciled grid of stone. Go back and place your masking tape over each penciled line, both horizontal then the verticals. Make sure you staggered the stone shapes so that they don't all stack up on each other.

When the area you want the stone effect in is masked, take a sea sponge, slightly dampened. Just hold it quickly under the faucet and wet it, then squeeze all the water you can out of it. Now dip it in your base stone color, which you have mixed with an equal amount of glaze. Just keep the proportion of glaze to paint equal and you won't need to worry about running out. Sponge the wall, not worrying about total coverage. You will want to use at least two colors, even three, to get a realistic effect. If you like a golden hues use a honey brown, a cream color and a light brown. Other good stone colors are a grayed brown and two shades of gray, or golden brown, brown and pale gray. Just sponge them randomly.

When you have finished sponging on the stone colors, give the paint some time to dry and then remove the quilter's tape. If you like, stencil in some details like this mama dove in a stone niche - or add a 3-D window frame and stencil curtains behind it as though we were looking into someone's home. Remember - the point is to have fun. So step back and admire your stone wall.

NOTE: This can become a brick wall by using a small, cut out brick shape as your guide instead of a stone-sized one. In this case, red, brown and terra cotta with a bit of black will give you a realistic effect.

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