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Paint a Movable Mural
Make a mural that can adapt to your lifestyle by painting on a canvas and applying it over liner paper to a wall. When you're ready to move and want to take your mural with you, simply peel the canvas off and reapply elsewhere.
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What You Need
- Primed cotton art canvas
- Latex paint: soft gold
- Strippable wallpaper adhesive
- Liner paper
- Prismacolor permanent marking pens in shades of brown
- Water-base polyurethane
- Tracing paper
- Transfer paper
- Straightedge
- Crafts or utility knife
Instructions
- Determine mural location on wall, and measure area.
- Apply liner paper to the area using strippable wallpaper adhesive, following manufacturer's instructions.
- Cut art canvas to fit the wall area, allowing several extra inches for shrinkage and trimming; include any openings for doors and windows. (Decorative artist Kathleen Deyo uses medium-quality canvas for her murals. Low-end canvas is too thin, and higher-quality canvas shrinks too much because of its higher linen content, she says.) Apply two coats of gold paint to the canvas, letting dry between coats. Select motifs for the mural from copyright-free designs, or draw them yourself. You may need to enlarge or reduce your designs using a photocopier.
- Work on a flat surface, and if desired, tape the canvas to the surface to hold it in place. Trace the designs onto tracing paper, and transfer them onto the canvas using transfer paper. Try to place a design element on both sides of any openings; for example, have each side of a tree flank a door opening.
- Using marking pens, which have thick and fine nibs, go over the design outlines to create a pen-and-ink look. Step away from the canvas to determine areas that need to be darkened. Add more heavy lines in some areas for emphasis. Work from the inside to the outside of shapes, such as leaves.
- Once the ink is dry, apply polyurethane to the mural. When dry, affix the mural to the wall over the liner paper using strippable wallpaper adhesive. Use a straightedge and a crafts or utility knife to trim edges. If you need to piece the mural, install the pieces side by side or overlap them 1/2-inch. Trim any overlapping excess canvas using a straightedge and a crafts or utility knife. Disguise the joined edges by applying a coat of base paint to the raw edges if necessary.
- To take down the mural, peel it off the wall, and remove the adhesive from the back with wallpaper paste solvent.
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