How to Paint a Star Wars Mural

Sometimes you might find yourself being creative because you’re just flooded with great ideas.  On this particular occasion, I found myself being creative because I was flooded with WATER.

When our sump pump in the basement stopped working, my son’s drab boring white room was flooded with melted snow. The carpet had to be ripped up and the bottom of the wall cut out. Bleh. After my sweet hubby fixed the drywall it was time to repaint. I decided to not look at this as a chore, but as an opportunity. What could we do to make this fun?  My eight year old son requested a Star Wars themed room and decided on the planet Endor.  So I did some googling and found this…

We liked this painting so the next step was deciding how to integrate it into my son’s room design.   I used Photoshop to lay out the room and get a rough idea of what we wanted it to look like…

Next was time to paint…. Fortunately, I found an old gallon of light blue paint I had purchased 6 months before for 5 bucks from Lowes mistint section of the paint department.  You can often purchase perfectly good unused gallons of paint marked down from $30 to $5!  Score!  Sometimes, as in this case, I’ll see a good deal on paint and if it’s a color I think I’ll need in the future (like a sky blue for murals) I’ll go ahead and grab it. Of course, then you need to remember you did that when it’s time to use it!

For the detail work I used acrylic paint from Hobby Lobby in the colors I needed.  You can print your reference photos to take with you to the store and match the colors there.

Below is the blank canvas and some random cutie pie who happened to be in the room… oh, wait… she’s mine.

The first step was painting the whole room with the recently discovered light blue flat wall paint.
Then I painted the farthest layer back… the mountains…   For this I used white acrylic craft paint and an art paintbrush to paint the snowy tops.  I used a slightly darker blue to add in the shadows.

The next things I painted were the grassy hills. For this I used a very wet regular kitchen sponge and some medium green acrylic paint and just pounded the wall.  This is messy and your kids will love it!  I actually let my little kids help me with part because it’s almost impossible to mess up. Just cover all that you want green in green. Using the same messy sponge, you can go back over the tops of your hills with a bright light green to make nice highlight.  Then, again with the same sponge, (I try to avoid cleaning at all costs) use some dark hunter green acrylic craft paint to add the shadows along the bottom of the wall and the base of the hills.

Next were the trees. These were fun.  Paint a long back line down. Then dab dab dab your paintbrush in medium green paint in a horizontal random lines. Adjust your pressure to make  branches lighter and darker.

The final thing to paint was the moon of Endor.  I tied a string to a piece of chalk and held the empty end of the string with my finger then used them like a compass to draw a circle on the wall.  White acrylic was the only paint color needed on the moon.

Here are all the elements (minus carpet!) put together.

So here it is!  Dry!  Dry paint, dry carpet, happy Mommy.

The whole mural took 15 hours and around 10 bucks. But the excited look and appreciative hug from my little boy was priceless.  Almost made the flood worth it…..   almost.  :)