how to paint your first mural

I went to Montreal to paint my first mural, and I'm going to teach you everything I learned. Last year, I participated in a program called CONCEPT. CONCEPT is an incubator for digital creators in Canada, led by YouTube and House. It was a great experience where I learned how to improve my YouTube channel and I met a lot of dope creators. As a CONCEPT grad, YouTube gave me the opportunity to paint a mural at Mural Festival this year. Check out the description to learn more about CONCEPT, and let's get into how I painted this mural. So first thing you need is your wall. You need to take measurements of the width and height of the wall that you'll be painting so that you can create your design. Then you'll use these measurements and create a document with the same dimensions. I use Photoshop for this, but you can use any software you want. You could even just do it on paper. Make sure to mark any spaces for windows or doors or cutouts. Now you can plan out your artwork so that it fits the wall. I drew my sketch of this beautiful woman holding a falcon and surrounded by flowers. Make sure to draw it in full color exactly how you want it to look on your mural. Then you want to make a version of your sketch that is just the outlines. Make sure to outline all the important shapes and outline all the individual colors. This is very important for making sure your mural comes out how you want. Once you have your drawing, it's time to transfer it to the wall. First make sure to prime your wall. My wall had a painting on it already, so the primer made sure to completely cover the old art. And if you have a prominent background color for your design, then you could paint the whole wall in that color. So for me, we painted my wall pink and that was the base color of the wall. Now to do the transfer. The transfer has to be done at night because we use a projector to project the image on the wall. Remember the outlines for your drawing? You'll essentially be tracing this on the wall. So that's why it's important to measure the wall so that the proportions are right. Once we set up the projector, we got in the lift and we used these paint markers to trace the drawing. Now let's talk about lifts. If you're painting a big wall, you need a lift machine to lift you and your materials in the air. If the wall is small, you could just use a ladder. But if you need a lift, make sure you do lift training. Lifts are very dangerous machines and if you don't know how to drive them safely, you could get injured. So I spent a whole day doing my lift training before I even started painting and I got my lift certification. By the way, my mural is a part of an event called Mural Festival. It's an annual festival that happens in Montreal, Quebec and they invite artists from all over the world to participate. YouTube is actually one of the sponsors of this festival and they invited me to come create this mural and I just feel so grateful for the opportunity. To learn more, check out the link in the description below. So the Mural Festival team handled all the organization and the logistics. They planned the training, they rented the lifts, and they got the wall and all the paint and materials. They were literally amazing. I could not have done this mural without them. They even gave me my own assistant to help me every step of the way. Hello, my name is Zoltan Vivat. I have a bachelor in Concordia in painting and drawing and a master in visual art. I'm a painter mixing different stylistic aesthetics and also using spray paint. I've worked with the Mural Festival since 2014. I did a couple of murals in Montreal. I also did graffiti back in the days. That's all about me. Awesome. Well, thank you for helping me with the murals. Yeah. So now that my drawing is transferred on the wall, we can start painting. If you're doing an exterior wall, you want to use exterior house paint or high quality spray paint. I don't know how to spray paint, so we used house paint from Canadian Tire and Benjamin Moore. And I actually went through all the colors that they had when I was doing my drawing. And I picked my colors from their preset list of colors. This makes the process way easier because you can just buy the gallons as is and you don't have to pre-mix any colors. So in total we had 21 colors and I got one gallon of each color, which was literally more than enough. We poured the colors in these smaller containers that I got from the dollar store. And then we put those colors in buckets so that it was easier to organize in the lift. The lift doesn't have a lot of space, so we had to be efficient. And now it's time to start painting. I had a picture of my drawing on my phone so that I could use it as a reference and know where to place all the colors. We started with the leaves at the top and at the bottom of the mural. We actually missed tracing a section at the bottom of the mural, so I just drew it out freehand. And the next day we started working on the flowers. One thing's for sure, this is something that you shouldn't do if you're afraid of heights. But for me, being up high was like one of my favorite parts. At this point, we're more than halfway done the mural. We stored all our supplies in the restaurant. And having a bunch of different brushes was key because we had so many different colors. After a while, I got comfortable driving the lift on my own. Having Zoltan with me definitely made the process faster. We would work in sections for about one to two hours, and then we would take a break. Painting the falcon was the most tedious part, but I love how it turned out. I like to clean my brushes at the end of the day because it just makes life easier for the next day. Closer to the bottom of the wall, we divided and conquered. I worked on the ladder while Zoltan worked on the lift. We had to do two coats of paint in some areas. And by the last day, all we had left to finish was one flower. Once we finished painting, it was time to clean up. We used paint thinner to clean any drips of paint from off the brick. And then we got into the lift one last time to take some photos of the finished mural. And here's the finished mural. I can't believe my first mural turned out so awesome. The woman in the mural represents anyone who is just pursuing their passion. The flowers signify her growth and her process. And the falcon represents the freedom that she feels just doing what she loves. In total, it took eight days to finish this mural. And if you want to check it out in person, you can go to 3800 St. Denis Street in Montreal. I spent the next few days in Montreal hanging out with the mural crew and exploring the city. Then I hopped on my flight back home. Overall, creating this mural was such a great experience. If you're thinking about doing a mural, definitely just go for it. Even if you don't have everything figured out, you can just learn as you go like I did. It does help to have someone experienced working with you. But a mural is basically like making a regular painting. It's just way bigger. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. And I'll see y'all in the next video. Peace!