Make Your Own Wall Mural Cheaply
When moving into a new home, it is nice to create something that will make that place feel more like home, such as making your own mural. A small or large wall mural will impart warmth, creativity, and familiarity into any surrounding.
It doesn’t take much artistic talent to put this kind of thing together! For example, craft stores sell cheap, pre-stretched canvases. These may not be ideal for fine art purposes, where the quality of the painting surface is paramount, but they are just a nice clean flat surface to decorate, arranged on an easy-to-hang wooden surface—perfect for the purposes of cheap, portable, decorative wall hangings.
Nearly anything can be added to these canvases: pretty fabric or decorative paper, for example. “Fat quarters” are quarter-yards of quilting material that can be purchased for a buck or two at any fabric store, and come in thousands of colors and designs. Any store with a stationery section—think big-box chains if you’re really in a pinch—will stock scrapbooking supplies, which include decoratively or thematically-decorated sheets of paper, sold individually. Grab a bottle of glue, maybe some acrylic paints, a vintage button or two from that ugly sweater lurking in the back of your closet, and you could have a unique, low-cost but high-impact collage mural in the span of an afternoon.
For the more artistically-inclined, it is always fun to imitate the masters: this mural will be a conversation piece, and a private decoration. Paint your hometown in the style of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Or why not give a family photo the pop-art treatment? Photoshop and iPhoto both can manipulate photos with ease, and printing a high-quality image at the nearest printshop will rarely run over a few bucks (as long as you avoid the extras like super-fancy-gloss paper). It doesn’t take a lot to spice up a home—just a few hours, some elbow grease, and an active imagination can add a lot of flair to any room!
