How to paint a Skyline Wall Mural

One of the yuckiest basement rooms in ChicagoHouse#1 has now been magically transformed into a teenage penthouse (check out the before pictures!)

One of my favorite things about the room is the skyline I painted on one of the paneled walls but before I daubed my freshly painted white walls with grey and black paint, I needed to make sure the concept worked (and was approved by the teenage whose space this is!)

In real life I am a web and graphic designer so I had a few sneaky tools up my sleeve to “virtually decorate” the room with the skyline.

First I designed the skyline in Illustrator. It was then imported into Photoshop and superimposed on a photograph of the blank wall I After a bit of color tweaking, playing around with different shade of gray I settled on a simple black and gray color palette, again with approval of said teenage.

Using my Photoshop image I sketched the skyline on the wall with pencil, the panels were actually a plus for this as it enabled me to reproduce scale wise exactly what I had created on Photoshop. Yippee!

But then they let me down. Because the paneling has a pretty rough surface my initial plan to carefully tape off and paint the skyline failed so I ended up painting the whole thing free hand. It’s a good job I have a steady hand. I was a bit of a cheap skate when it came to the paint. I bought a small can of black and did some home mixing with white to achieve the grey.