I recently finished painting one of my plane tree patterns on a wall plastered with mud in my friends’ straw bale house.
Simple lines in white emulsion paint are very effective on the beautifully coloured and textured mud, which still has straw poking through it in some places
This is the digital version of the design, you can see its evolution here in one of my previous posts
About seven years ago I painted the mural below in the same house, also on a wall plastered with mud, it was then visible in the main living space.
They’ve since built the new internal mud plastered wall to create another room for their expanded family so the first mural is hidden inside the new bedroom.
I enjoyed the whole experience of painting in white on mud so much (and I’m also a bit vain and missed seeing my art work from the living room) so it was lucky that my friends happily agreed to my proposal to paint a mural on the new wall and we settled on a theme of leaves.
This is the bare mud wall
I made this plan for the mural in Photoshop, using the cut out, inverted line work of my original pattern
I then ‘Photoshopped’ it to the photograph of the bare wall to check on the layout before transferring the design to the wall
I started by projecting the image onto the wall and drawing the outline in white pencil but ran into technical difficulties with the electrical equipment. I had to resort to plan B which meant tracing the pattern using chalk on the reverse surface of a printed template and then penciling over the chalk lines, which was far more messy and time consuming but ultimately effective.
This is a detail of the pencil drawing
Here is the partially completed mural
and a head on view of the completed mural without the added domestic decoration
This was a really enjoyable project, completed in many short sessions over a period of several months, combined with delicious lunch visits to my lovely friends.
It also fulfilled my ambition to complete a painted version of one of my digitally designed patterns on a real life wall.