This week’s guest post is from Andrea, a mommy and blogger over at her blog The Everyday Soiree. Andrea’s blog is filled with DIY projects, home decor and fashion ideas, sprinkled with tales of motherhoods. Today she is sharing a how-to DIY wall mural! She painted this mural for her son’s nursery – and even the least artistically-inclined can accomplish this mural.

Take it away, Andrea!

After seeing a couple amazing paint by number murals, I decided I would love to take on a similar project for my sons room. Here is my how-to!

1. I printed off my image a drew a graph on it.  I then drew a corresponding graph on the wall. Of course easier than graphing it out would be to project your image.  If you are someone with absolutely no artistic skill, I think you could still successfully do this by projecting your image and getting someone at the art supply store to help you with paint colors and mixing.

2. After the graph was drawn I went square by square drawing in the image. When you are drawing in each square, it’s best to not think about your entire image, but just see the specific shapes that are in that square. (I say square, they are really rectangles … but you get it).

3.  I attempted to actually number my colors, but got sick of it pretty fast and decided to just eye it. However, if you are a person who will be nit-picky about your colors being an exact match, I suggest numbering them and doing all the whites at one time, blues at one time, etc. A useful thing would be saving your mixed paint in some kind of tupperware.  That way if you have to leave the project in the middle of painting, you wont have to mix the color again to exactly match what you have already done.

4. I spent a lot of time painting over colors I had already painted. Just because I didn’t like the way it looked once on the wall.  You can see an example below in the shadowed sails. I went from a light purplish pink (which was more true to the original image) to a dark grey-ish purple.

I worked on this project over a few months and it probably took me around 20-30 hours to complete. The length of time it will take to complete depends on the detail of your image and how much time you spend playing with the colors.

Here is the finished product!

Thank you for sharing Andrea! For more of Andrea’s DIY projects – head over to her blog.

Do you have a fab project you’d like to share? Email us with photos press@stylishpatina.com.

You could easily paint this mural with chalk paint – head over to our online shop to order!