DIY Mountain Mural – Expand Your Horizon

“Make your body a temple, your home a shrine”  ~T.L.

I’ve long embraced the idea that to beautify your surroundings is to beautify your life.  When my wife pinned a post by a Canadian artist Pam Lostracco about transforming an apartment’s bedroom into an expansive Thailand-inspired mountain vista… we were blown away, and knew we had to do it.

Three days, one-hundred dollars and a very sore arm later… our version of the “The Mountain Mural Makeover” was complete. Here’s how you can do it to:

Expanding Horizons:

We were so taken by the artist’s original that we opted to follow her instructions, down to the colors of paint she used, to achieve the same effect. However, as we got into the nitty-gritty we found plenty of opportunities to experiment and make it our own. While what follows are details on how we arrived at our final result, there are a few starting ideas I’d like to share at the outset:

1) Make it yours – There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Go nuts!

2) Take your time – This mural took us 2 1/2 days. Be ready for a time commitment!

3) Ask for help – I was amazed at how much I learned (and some bad roads I was able to avoid) by asking the paint experts at the local Ace Hardware store for help and inviting them into what I was doing.

3) Have fun – As my art teacher used to say, “you can’t be attached to results.”

Misty Mountain Mural Timelapse – 20 Hours in 2 minutes.

Misty Mountain Mural – How To:

Difficulty: V6/ Adv –

I will disclose that this was a fairly difficult project, due to the number of elements involved and the patience required for each step. If you really like the way this looks but don’t want to do the dance yourself, I know the original artist Pam Lostracco paints these as part of her business, (and there are probably local artists around you who would love a fun job like this!)

Time: 2 – 3 days

Give yourself plenty of time. This is not something you could realistically do in a day… even if you are a sucker for punishment.

Materials:

 Paint –

We used only two colors in this mural, Natural White at the top and Kendal Charcoal at the bottom. These were the exact colors that Pam used, but we were surprised at how cool they actually are. (Photographs are liars). I encourage you to use any colors that match your space. As long as you have a very light color and very dark color, the effect will work well.

Brushes –

Our mural was painted with a medium, flat brush for the details/ridges and a large flat brush for filling in large space. Although we bought a small roller, we never used it as the spaces are so irregular and small that the brush works best, and means less to clean between colors. Be prepared for a sore wrist! Many of the layers require multiple coats.

Odds & Sods –

We made ample use of graph paper, a tape measure, level and the usual muralist’s kit. Painters tape is a must for the wall edges and space around windows.

Planning & Preparation:

Our wall is 8 x 26 ft (208ft^2).  We created a scale mock-up of the wall on pad of graph paper, making sure to account for the two 5 x 6 ft windows. We marked off every foot on the X and Y axis to help us map the image to the wall. We sketched the 9 layers of mountain-ridges and tried to arrange them to fit the space and account for objects we knew would be against the wall. We assigned each row of mountains a letter, A to I at the top.

On the wall itself, we marked off the 1 foot intervals along the baseboard and ceiling, and added marks for the Y axis in up the center of the wall and about 2 feet away from each of the windows.

My wife used the tick marks to orient herself as she expertly copied the scaled drawing to the wall in pencil.

Mixing the Paint:

The mural was painted with only two colors, which were blended together in steps from top to bottom. This was the most difficult part of the process,  requiring a lot of trail and error. I opted toward being diligently scientific, and even consulted a math-teacher friend to help me nail down my ratios to evenly transition from darkest to lightest.

With 9 different shades, some of them almost imperceptibly subtle, my perfectly-linear gradient ran into trouble after the first two layers were painted (as you can see in the timelapse). Like many things in nature, the fall-off of the mountains follows an exponential curve rather than a linear one, so my initial ratios of 10:0, 9:1, 8:2, 7:3 and so on resulted in a jarring first transition.

I ended up experimenting by adding very small amounts of the gray to an initial 8 oz of white, then testing the paint on the wall. I think the initial ratio was closer to 90:1 than 9:1!

Paint looks lighter that it actually is when it’s wet, so be sure to let your test patches dry before moving forward. I found that for the subtle transitions I was after in these initial steps, when I got to the right blend– the new wet paint of a new layer was almost the exact same color as the dried paint above it. When the new layer dried, it darkened to be fractionally darker than the layer above.

As I got closer to the bottom, the steps became a bit bolder, with the bottom most layer being 100% kendal charcoal.

I used cheap, resealable paint containers to mix each color, and made sure I had plenty left over for second coats and touch ups. I labeled each one with the letter that corresponded to the mock up.

Painting the Mountain Mural:

Working from top (white) to bottom (charcoal), I painted each layer, using my smaller brush for the ridge lines and the larger brush to fill in the space in the middle.

The reason to start from the top when painting the mountain mural is that each new, lower layer slightly overlaps the one above it, giving you a crisp edge for the tops of the hills. You can get away with some level of sloppiness on the lower profile of each layer, but to really look professional the upper most ridge requires a perfectly crisp line. The nice thing about house paint is it covers so well, you can experiment till you find the right technique without worrying about ruining your masterpiece.

Depending on the original color of the wall, the darkest and lightest layers near the top and bottom will need two coats of paint to get even coverage.

Each layer is a solid color, mixed to be slightly darker than the one above it, slightlylighter than the one below. For this reason there is an incredible optical illusion of fog behind each ridge. It looks like each layer is shaded when in fact our eyes are tricking us, furthering the illusion of space that makes these murals so easy to get lost in.

When painting each ridge line, I tried to keep a feeling of gravity in mind, creating peaks and slopes that had a downward movement to them. People often think of mountains as “jutting up” from the ground, when in fact their features are created by endless erosion moving material down hill. Geology tickles!

Cost

We purchased two 1 gallon cans of paint at roughly $35 each, and used less than 1/3 of each can. Two quarts of each color would likely have been adequate, although paint makers are a dastardly bunch, so the price of two 1 quart cans is more than a gallon of the same.

After accounting for brushes, mixing containers & lids, tape and other odds and ends, our total cost was in the neighborhood of $115.

The last words

I am astounded at the difference made by two cans of paint and some diligence. In an 1100 square foot house, this front room is where we hang out most of the time, and now feels like the whole side of our monkey-container has been sliced off revealing that we’ve always been several thousand feet above the rolling mountains of an exotic land.

Whoa.

Special Thanks to Pam Lostracco, Blue Hovatter, Fort Collins Downtown Ace Hardware and Maxwell Hughes.

~r