Transform Your Blank Walls: 4 DIY Muralists Reveal Their Secrets

Bare walls are depressing. Acquiring art can be a chore. Installing wallpaper is expensive. But with a laser-focused vision, a dash of craftiness, and some determination, you (or an artist you trust and like) can turn the naked walls in your home into lovely murals.

Leaving impressionistic images on interior surfaces is, of course, a time-honored tradition. Cave paintings tell us about how people lived in prehistoric times. Illustrations on the walls of Egyptian tombs honor those who had passed. Some murals even inspire sheer awe, like those painted on cathedral ceilings.

Murals also tell us stories about the people who painted them and why—and ahead, four DIY mural artists, all with a different approach to their wall paintings, do exactly that. We spoke with them on transforming walls into art canvases, and how you too can pull off your own mural.

Go Bold and Blocky

When Luiza Solano and her partner bought Roya, the Miami-property-turned-Airbnb, a few years ago, she knew just what the sun-drenched, open-format kitchen/living room needed: a mural for the closet that hid the washer and dryer. "We were on a budget and getting an artist would have cost a pretty penny, so I searched for a design that was approachable, which was color blocks," she says.

First, she looked at a bunch of color references. Pug Seal, a boutique hotel in Oaxaca, Mexico, with murals, was an early inspiration. Next, Solano drew lines directly on the wall with a pencil, erasing and retracing until she got it right. "It’s totally a feeling. I don’t always know what I want, but I know when I see it and when it feels balanced," she says. Since the plan was for a wraparound mural, she took a wide-angle photo and placed it into an image-editing app to mock up the wall to figure out how to lay out the palette.

Solano eventually landed on nine complementary colors, three of which were the same shade of blue but with different amounts of white paint mixed in, which helped the color blocks stay tonally consistent. She had never painted a mural before, so she recalls "trusting the process," even during moments where she doubted herself. (It all worked out in the end.)

Finally, to achieve what she calls a "faux limewash effect," Solano layered on an off-white, matte-finish paint from Behr in Shoelace over the entire mural. "I feel like color blocking was an easy way to have high design without it being too difficult to achieve," she says.

Stencil and Stamp It

Clare Sullivan, an interior designer and home-improvement content creator, took a more patterned approach—instead of painting an entire wall, she stamped and dabbed murals all over her Cape Cod-style house in Connecticut. "I always stencil because I’m looking for a wallpaper effect, but I could do it myself and spend fifty dollars max versus thousands of dollars," she says. "It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of work to wallpaper a room."

You can find stencil templates—acetate sheets with decorative cutouts—online; Sullivan has ordered templates from Amazon and Etsy in the past. "Buy multiples," she suggests, "because it speeds up the process. I like to put one up, paint it, and work on another template while I wait for the other one to dry." You can also make your own template by finding an image online, placing a plastic sheet on the screen (a desktop screen works best), tracing the image with a Sharpie, and then using an X-Acto knife to cut out the design.

As for selecting her palette, "I’ll usually pick one [main] color—in the case of this guest room, it was a cherry red, and then I picked a complementary color to that, which was a pink, and then I went with two little accent shades, which was a blue and a green," she says of her process. Before she started stenciling, she had repainted the room white.

Since she was going for a symmetrical, wallpaper-like format, Sullivan had to measure carefully. "Square stencils are easy to lay out, but there’s a staggered quality to wallpaper that I like to think about," she says. In order to achieve this effect, she actually mapped out two separate grids.

As for tools and supplies, she recommends a bowl of water, cheap kitchen sponges that are cut into one-inch pieces, the original wall color (to touch up any mistakes with a small brush), and Scotch Spray Mount Adhesive—not painter’s tape, which Sullivan says can get crusty and messy. Spray adhesive is sticky but non-goopy, and easy to peel off without damaging walls.

When you’re ready to start painting, Sullivan says to dab with a delicate hand. "If you start smooshing, it’ll bleed, and that’s the biggest issue you might encounter," she says. "You never want to brushstroke—otherwise, you’ll go through the lines and the bristles might go underneath the template." For the "weird little nooks and crannies" that don’t fit an entire stencil, she recommends tackling those areas last and cutting the stencil templates to make them fit.

"I think people can get intimidated by DIY, but it’s really rewarding to create something with your hands," she says. "And it saves you a lot of money, too."

Split It in Half

Brooklyn-based interior designer Sydney Moss previously lived in an apartment where the front door opens to a long and narrow hallway. "It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the apartment so I wanted it to have an impact," she says.

She painted a low mural that essentially functions as a trompe l’oeil chair rail, which she says "was a nice way to split a narrow space in half." (The bonus is that you can sit while you paint.) "I was gardening a lot and became obsessed with marigolds, which is why I painted them," she adds. Sydney loved the idea of repeatable block prints, but still wanted each flower to be individual so she drew each one freehand with a pencil then painted them, using leftover sample paints from previous projects.

She used Behr’s Dynasty paint line—it doubles as a one-coat primer, is fast-drying, and doesn’t scuff—which is especially ideal for rentals like hers where the walls might not be finished. "I wish I had added a coat of white first, and then painted over it, but it was too late," she says. "I’m kind of learning as I go. What I want to do [moving forward] is add a nice base coat color first, and then go in."

Undertaking such a personal project in a rental is a bittersweet experience, so it’s helpful to approach it with a Zen mindset. "I just accept that it’s going to get covered up one day, but that I got to do it while I was here," Moss says. Case in point: Last month, she and her partner had to move unexpectedly but she has since viewed this relocation as an opportunity to start another mural project. This time, she’s painting a floor-to-ceiling mural of trees in a windowless room that’s used as her office.

"When I was taking continuing ed classes at Pratt, my professors talked about how psychologically you respond to images of nature the same way you would respond to real plants and feel a sense of calm that’s good for anxiety," Moss says. "To have images of nature in the home is joyful. I want to cover my world with flowers."

Try Bits and Bobs

The Brooklyn-based artist Laura Chautin is deft with paint and brushes—many of her drawings are of charming nature scenes—so she felt compelled to pick up her tools when she and her partner moved into a new apartment last year.

"We have really big, open bedroom walls, and I wanted to do something fun when I was pregnant and really sick during the first trimester," Chautin says of her impromptu mural. "Everyone was on holiday, and I was kind of depressed, and it was so hot in the summertime so I stayed in the whole time and painted these little make-believe scenes."

Chautin didn’t plan much for this particular project—"I literally painted while standing on top of my bed," she says and used her usual art supplies, including acrylic paints. Initially, she wanted to paint a full wall mural but opted for a bits-and-bobs approach, using her illustrations to frame the bed so that she didn’t have to move furniture around. The only reason why the paintings stop at a certain point is because "I couldn’t go any higher because of my height," she says.

Similar to her ceramic goods, Chautin’s mural vignettes are contained but highly detailed with moody clouds, blooming trees, and foot paths that lead to wherever your imagination desires. "I have a color palette that I like to use throughout my work, which is often times a pink or a red with greens," says Laura. "I’m sure [these scenes are] pulled from all different places and travels. I went with the flow."

As for the wall base, Laura’s landlord had already painted the apartment using a slightly warmer white and had installed big pendant lights from Japan. "They really make the room, so I knew that anything I painted was going to have this nice, warm effect," Laura says.