Mural Timelapse

I decided I wanted to learn to paint, so I painted a mural in my basement! Check out this timelapse to see how I did it, with some audio commentary. Watch it in 4K!

Transcript:

Hey everybody, I wanted to share with you this cool project I’ve been working on, and I wanted to show how I did it!

I had a blank wall in my basement in a room that will eventually become my kids’ play room, and I’ve always had a project in the back of my mind. I saw somewhere that you can paint anything you want using a projector to just project that image, and then you kind of just paint what you see. I finally had the opportunity to try it out and I wanted to share a time lapse of how I did it!

The goal basically is to project an image onto the wall, which you can see here I’m doing with the lights off, and I’m just painting these clouds. And then later I turn the lights on and I just sort of fill in those lines. Then I project the next layer, which in this case is the sun, paint the lines, and then again fill it in. I keep doing that over and over again until ultimately I’m painting the final product.

The plus signs at the top are painters tape that I use to keep the projector in the exact same place in case it gets bumped.

I learned a ton about painting during this project. First and foremost, latex paint sticks better to primer than other latex paint, so the very first thing that I did here (which was to cover the entire primed wall with that peach background color) actually made the entire job instantly more difficult!

To answer a few other questions:

• Where did I learn to paint?
  • literally on this project I always thought that the idea was cool but I never had a blank wall to really try it.
• Why did you think you could paint this?
  • Hubris. my backup plan was basically just to cover it all up with a regular wall color.
• Favorite paint color?
  • The light blue of the second mountain that I paint.
• Favorite paint flavor?
  • Same one, actually.
• How long did this take?
  • Well, the total footage time is about 10 hours, which was 25 different paint sessions, and it totals about 400 gigs of 4K video.
• Wait a minute! If it took multiple days, why are you wearing the same clothes throughout?!
  • That’s because I had two sets of identical clothes that I rotated and washed I thought it would give some kind of continuity to the video…but nobody I actually showed this to noticed.
• How much did this cost?
  • About $400 in paint, plus $200 for the projector. But now I have a projector, so I guess that was kind of an investment. Also it turns out you really don’t need that much paint to cover a wall of the size, so most of the cans of paint are still 90% full. I guess that was an investment too, but I don’t really see myself painting anything more after this. I think I’ve gotten it out of my system.

Another major lesson that I learned is that putting lighter paint on top of darker paint doesn’t work so well and it requires multiple passes.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video – I really enjoyed working on this project!