Creating a Mario Room Wall Mural Part 2: Choosing Paint Colors and Painting

Congrats! You have completed Part 1 of creating a Mario Room Wall Mural. You now have all of the stencils you will need to finish the Mario mural with the correct room scale. Now on to some more fun things!

Picking the Paint Colors

This whole project was all my husband’s doing but I did have one tiny part in his amazing mural. I got to choose the paint colors for everything. We printed enlarged portions of the below picture and matched them to paint samples at Wal-Mart. I had fun trying to match the colors as close as I could to the printed images.

Image by Ian-Albert.com

All of the paints we used were purchased at Wal-Mart. We used the Color Place brand (for most of the paint) of flat paint because it was the cheapest per gallon. It might not be the best quality but we did not have the money to spend on top quality paint especially when we had to buy gallons and gallons of paint. I think the paint we used turned out just fine!

If you want to use the exact paint colors we did here are the paint codes you can take into Wal-Mart to achieve them.

• · Black: Basic Premixed Flat Black
• · Dark Green

1. KX 1Y 16
2. AXX 9Y 15
3. D 27 ½
4. E 38

• · White: Basic Premixed Flat White
• · Brown: “Orange Sienna” Better Homes and Garden’s Interior Flat
• · Highlight White: “Flowering Baby’s Breath”

1. C 2
2. L 6
3. R 4

• · Orange: “True Royal Love”

1. KX 3Y 24 ½
2. AXX 7Y 19
3. L 15
4. V 37

• · Light Green

1. KX 3Y 33
2. AXX 7Y 30 ½
3. D 11 ½
4. E 20 ½

• · Gold

1. KX 1Y 14 ½
2. R 37
3. T 9Y 44 ½

• · Sky Blue: “Blue Sausalito Bay”

1. B 22
2. D 2
3. E 2Y 38

• · Red: Sorry, for some reason we don’t have a name or color code for the red paint.

Painting Time

Yay! The fun part! Painting has to be the most fun part of this project other than seeing the finished product. Note: My husband wrote the directions so when you see “I” that’s Crafty Dad talking most of the time.

1. The first thing you need to do is determine how high on the wall you need to start the mural in order to keep the proportions. I took my basic block and determined how many blocks high the world was. I determined that it would be about 12 blocks high or about 6 feet. In the room that I was painting the walls were 9 feet high so I started my ground bricks about 3 feet from the ground.
2. Next, I measured around the room making marks at 3 and 4 feet off of the ground. I used a chalk line to make straight lines at the 3 and 4 foot marks. I then put painters tape right above the 3 foot line and just below the 4 foot line all the way around the room. All of the area above the 4 foot line was painted sky blue and the area below the 3 foot line was painted black. Note: You don’t have to paint the bottom half of the room black if you don’t want to. We just choose black to make the rest of the world pop.
3. After the black and the sky blue areas dried I then placed painters tape just below the 3 foot line and just above the 4 foot line. The area in between this tape was then painted brown.
4. Once the brown area dried I covered all of it with painters tape. After covering the brown area with tape I begin to draw out the squares for the ground bricks. I use my ground brick stencil and place it on top of the painters tape and traced around the outside. I repeated this step until I created the outline of all of the ground bricks on the tape.
5. Next I started to plan where I was going to place all of the other elements of the world. Looking at my original picture and using the ground blocks as a guide I started to place the elements that appeared in the sky blue area first but you may start wherever you like. After locating the general area for an element I would cover that small area with painters tape and trace the outline of each item on the painters tape.
6. Then I cut off one part of the stencil and went around to every block where that item would be placed to trace on the new part of the element. After all of the elements were updated on the wall I then cut out a little more of the shape and traced that part onto the proper area on the wall. I continued with this process until I went through all of the stencils and copied all of them onto their proper spot on the wall. This resulted in all of the stencils being drawn on the painter’s tape that we placed on the wall in step 5.
7. The next step is to start painting each of the elements on the wall. I picked an element and found the inner most section of the drawing. I used a razor knife to cut out this shape and remove the tape exposing the wall. Then I painted the proper color in the newly exposed wall. Work your way around the room exposing one piece of each element at a time and then paint it. Warning: You will be finding bits of painter’s tape for a long time and all throughout your house. I still occasionally find painter’s tape stuck to a sock and the room has been done now for about 4 months.
8. Once the paint dries you can start removing the next portion of the tape using a razor knife and start painting it. You will remove the tape and start painting from the inside out of every element until you complete all of the elements to finish the mural.

Once the room was complete I added some finishing touches like a Mario lamp, bedding, Mario figures, and pops of green. We painted some old shelves and dressers the same color as the small and large bushes that are in the mural, bought green valances, and even got my son a big green fuzzy pillow (he’s love soft things) so that the green would be his room’s accent color.

This whole process (Part 1 & 2) took my husband about 4 months to do so it is not a quick project by any means. That’s not bad considering he mainly painted at night and on weekends only. The end result was more than worth it though!

My husband loved the finished product so much that a Zelda mural may be in his future. How do you have your child’s room decorated?

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