Five Things to Consider Before Commissioning a Wall Mural

A mural is the only piece of lettering a client cannot put in a drawer if they change their mind. That is what makes it exciting, and it is also why the planning matters more than the painting. Five things are worth deciding before you commission one.

1. What the wall is actually made of

Fresh plaster, old emulsion, brick, breeze block and previously wallpapered walls all behave differently under paint. Fresh plaster needs to cure, usually four to six weeks, before anything permanent goes onto it. A wall that has been patched and painted repeatedly may need sanding and a coat of base colour first. None of this is a problem, but it changes the timescale, so photographs of the actual surface are more useful to me than a description of it.

2. How far away people will stand

This is the single most common thing people get wrong, and it decides everything about the design. Lettering read from two metres in a hallway can carry fine detail and a delicate script. Lettering read from twenty metres across a school hall needs weight, spacing and far fewer words. Walk to where people will actually be standing and look back at the wall before deciding what it should say.

3. Fewer words than you think

Almost every brief arrives with too much text. A wall is not a page, and a mural that has to be read like a paragraph will not be read at all. The strongest walls I have painted carry one line that people remember rather than three that people skim. If you have a longer piece of writing you love, consider whether one phrase from it could carry the whole wall.

4. Where the light falls

Colour on a wall changes completely between morning and evening, and between a north facing room and a south facing one. A deep teal that looks rich in a photograph can read as flat grey in a corridor lit only by strip lights. I paint samples and look at them in the room at the times of day it is actually used, which is far more reliable than choosing from a colour chart on a screen.

5. When the room can be out of use

Most rooms take one to three days on site, plus preparation. Schools tend to book inset days and holidays, cafes prefer the quiet start of a week, and homes are usually easiest around a room that is already being decorated. Acrylics are touch dry within hours and the room is normally back in ordinary use the following day, so the disruption is smaller than people expect.

What happens next

Once those five are settled, I draw a scale layout so you can see exactly how the lettering will sit on your wall, in your colours, at your size. Nothing is painted until you have seen it and said yes.

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