Mural how to

Audrey's room has made me a lover of do it yourself projects. I have had a blast putting together her room and absolutely love spending time up there. Her room is a mash up of several different pins on Pinterest.

We knew wanted some kind of giraffe painted on her wall, so the searching commenced, me on Pinterest and Stinson on a super awesome app. called houzz. He came across a tree with book shelves put on a couple branches that we loved, and he thought it'd be cool to have a giraffe eating out of he tree.

Now that we had our idea, we emailed it to my super-talented Aunt Lexie, and she used her graphic design skills to come up with the mural. Next step was having her design printed on a transparency at Office Depot. Cost of that was $0.53. Once you have your transparency, you need an overhead projector to project the image up on the wall, so to obtain said overhead, you call a teacher friend who has been teaching forever and who you know has held on to their overhead even though they don't use it anymore.

Now that your image is projected on the wall trace said image onto the wall with chalk. Chalk is much better than pencil because it erases easily and is easily covered with paint. Then, using the paint color(s) of your choice, color inside the lines! We used left over white from her chevron wall, but you could purchase a paint sample for yours. It really doesn't take much paint, I did two coats and maybe used 8oz of paint total. I used a variety of small paint brushes I picked up at Michaels for less than $4.

Once the paint is completely dry, use a dry cloth to brush off any chalk that was not covered up by paint. Now your mural is complete! If you don't have a super talented Aunt Lexie or are not gifted with artistic ability, yo could find an image on the web you like to have printed on your transparency.

My total cost for this project was $4, but if you have to buy paint it'll be closer to $10. It is a bit time intensive. It took my sister-in-law, Sara, and I about 30 minutes to trace it onto the wall. Then we started painting after the babies were in bed for an hour and a half, and I finished the next day with both coats in about two and a half hours. The final product was totally worth the time!

Since I'm posting this from my phone I don't know how to insert the photos throughout the post, so here they are all at once.