100 things I learned from painting a mural

1. Painting murals is very fun.
2. Painting murals is very time consuming.
3. I learned that I’d be in direct sunlight around 11:30am at this location. It was 90+ degrees almost every day. So I learned that I needed to set a time slot for myself to work. This time slot was 7-11am.
4. Some paints (most paints) shouldn’t be applied in over 90º heat. I skipped those days.
5. You gotta be flexible with your schedule, because you never know what’s going to happen.
6. I learned that when I set myself a schedule, I can stick with it. As long as there’s a very specific goal I’m working towards.
7. The brushes that came with the Home Depot roller kit were some of the best brushes I used. They’re thick & dense and hold a lot of paint.
8. Zibra brushes are kinda a standard tool - or they’ve got a good marketing team. Can’t really tell.
9. I learned what makes a good brush for all sorts of different elements of mural painting. It’s different if you’re working on large areas, tiny details, letters, tiny details on letters, organic shapes, and shadows of organic shapes. This is just the tip of the iceberg! I haven’t even tried to blend colors or splatter stuff or do all sorts of different effects or work REALLY big.
10. Speaking of brush tips, I LOVED this brush for lettering. It had a perfectly shaped filbert (rounded) end, and the bristles were long, but less floopy than the other brushes.
11. I learned that filbert means rounded.
12. I did NOT like these Lettering Quill Brushes, and I can’t remember where I got the recommendation from. They were too soft & floopy and the bristles were really long and I didn’t like it. Booooo.
13. I bet there’s a lot of technique to using them well, and I’m going to practice in my spare time. They’re probably great. I just don’t know what I’m doing.
14. Pandr has a great list of recommendations. Those quill brushes weren’t on there. But everything else was wildly helpful for me to think of.
15. Like buckets for instance. Buckets to toss your dirty brushes into so they don’t get all crusty & ruined.
16. If your rinse bucket is too dense with paint, it’ll stain the pavement if you dump it into the gutter. Probably shouldn’t do that again.
17. Now that I’ve finished the mural, I feel like I’ve got spare time, but this isn’t really true.
18. In my attic, we had two (two!) glass desktops sitting unused under a bed, and these were great for a week of practicing priming methods, testing techniques, and experimenting with brushstrokes, materials, and styles.
19. One time, I used one of those drippy paint markers over a thin layer of paint, and it ripped the entire design off the surface of the glass. Fucking terrifying. I did NOT use any of those in the end. Again, technique matters, but I wasn’t going to take that risk this time.
20. I learned a ton about how to work with Procreate on the iPad, basically giving myself a crash course in the app specifically for this job. Procreate was the best tool for me to iterate on ideas for the mural, then on iterations of the final design. Using it for a specific goal, all day long, was a great way to actually learn the methods & processes that have been a bit of the learning curve I hadn’t yet felt like overcoming.
21. I could work on this on my iPad from the pool and then go down the waterslide and toss my kid around. Everyone wins.
22. Procreate has a limit of 40 layers.
23. I learned how to install new fonts onto my iPad for Procreate
24. Diluting your paint is important. Not diluting it much, but diluting it just enough so that it’s not too dense, but not too diluted. This sounds so vague but whatever. Figure it out. (This is a note to myself. I’ve got to figure it out.)
25. You should take off masking tape before the paint dries & cures. Otherwise, you may peel off your whole damn mural. Again. Terrifying.
26. The adapter that converts a car’s cigarette lighter port into a standard outlet does not provide enough energy to power my projector.
27. My projector, when plugged in, was strong enough to cast an image on the windows for me to trace - even in daytime. Overcast daytime at least. I knew it was a semi-decent projector, but I still didn’t think that was actually going to work. That was awesome.
28. If you’ve got your projector set up in the middle of a busy intersection for a while, eventually the cops might tell you to stop. But as long as you can convince them this is the only way to do it and after the next 20 minutes you’ll never have to do it again, they’ll probably let it slide.
29. It was a bit difficult to get that projector aligned perfectly. I had to rotate, skew, zoom, etc. There’s definitely a better way, but after 10 minutes of noodling, I got it. That’s exactly when the cops showed up.
30. When you try to blame everything on DJ Thomas Schmid, he’ll just run away. What are you trying to hide, Thomas?
31. People honk a lot at the intersection of South Orange & Vose. There are a lot of impatient drivers and a lot of terrible, dumb drivers.
32. On South Orange Ave, metered parking starts at 9am. On Vose, it starts at 8am.
33. A parking ticket is $45.
34. I might know someone who can make that parking ticket disappear.
35. Painting on glass is tricky. It’s a non-porous surface, which makes it more challenging to paint permanently on. What I used is GAC 200 - an acrylic binder. This article was a fantastic, well researched bit of information for me. GAC 200 was my first layer of primer for the project. It adhered to the window better than anything else, and created a surface that was capable of being painted on.
36. I used Zinsser 1-2-3 exterior house primer for the white primer layer.
37. The rest of the mural was done with Behr house paint from Home Depot. There’s more specialized sign-painting paints, like One-Shot paint. But it would’ve been wildly expensive for this much coverage. It’s better for detailed lettering jobs. Exterior satin enamel house paint is designed to withstand pouring rain, snow, hail, excruciating heat…it would definitely work for this.
38. It seems like I should only be buying my art supplies from art stores, but Home Depot is a repository for all sorts of creative home design ideas, so it definitely counts, right?
39. Covering the Tratt’s windows from the outside immediately lowered the temperature inside by a couple degrees. This mural is saving them a bunch on air conditioning. Win-win-win.
40. Village Tratt wanted to cover the windows because when the sun shines in, it’s too bright to read their tickets.
41. The owner of Village Tratt also owned no165 - one of the shops I’ve illustrated. There’s a direct correlation between that sketchbook illustration and this mural.
42. I learned the proper pronunciation of “Trattoria”
43. The pizza oven vent is right above where I was painting. It was hot. And it smelled like pizza all day.
44. You gotta stir the One Shot paint. You can’t just shake the can. The good stuff is in the bottom. Like fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt.
45. Jerry’s Artist Outlet in West Orange is stocked with a lot more brushes now.
46. Jerry’s Artist Outlet in West Orange is stocked with a lot of everything now. They’re back, baby!
47. You can walk into the area off to the right at Jerry’s (behind the registers) even though there’s an “employees only” sign there. I’m actually still a bit confused about that but it’s true. They have a lot of spray paint & things in there. One Shot paint for instance. They weren’t terrifically stocked up on One Shot at the time though.
48. One of the guys who works at Jerry’s was also born in 1977 just like me.
49. He’s got a sense of humor where if I ask “what time do you close?” he’ll say “For you? 4:00.” Even though they close at 5:00. I appreciate this kind of sass. He’s done this to me on two separate occasions.
50. Pinterest is a cool resource for ideas.
51. I’m not the first person to come up with the pizza wings idea, but that’s ok. It’s still a great idea.
52. Blending house paints is trickier than using solid colors. I got this tip from Magie McGowan from Home Sweet Home Tattoo, and because of that, I’m going to save blending colors for later murals.
53. Mixing colors to get specific shades isn’t too hard. This is different from blending.
54. Mixing the same color days later is anxiety-inducing, but I nailed it. (I had to replicate the dark brown accent of the pizza slices for the text at the bottom of the mural, but I didn't have any of that color left. It was a mix of organe and brown and red. But like, not an exact mix by any means. Had to eyeball it.)
55. The garbage collector who empties the public garbage cans thinks of his job as “getting to just hang out all day” and I love that. Dude just wanders around & gets to chat with the regulars and whoever happens to be passing by. He better take a selfie with my mural some day.
56. Scott Holdren has a business doing large scale painting and has applied a scratch-proof varnish over the mural. He’s a buddy. Call him when you need your murals sealed. He’s got a spray-net franchise. Here’s his email: scott.holdren@spray-net.com.
57. There is a sealant he can use, and then there’s an anti-graffiti sealant. That anti graffiti stuff is cool, because you can use strong cleaning agents to clean off the vandalism without ruining what’s underneath. I’m not concerned about that but it’s something I may have to use down the line.
58. His supplier ships from California and it takes about a week for the stuff to get here, so I had to push back the schedule a bit. Again, you gotta be flexible.
59. Sometimes your best ideas happen by accident. The “Say Cheese” bit was never part of the original design. One day, Hannah Zollman came by to snap a photo of me and said “Say Cheese!” and I was like “oh my god I have to include that in the design. For real, this is a great idea.” Then I went to the pool, fired up Procreate on my iPad, and designed a cheese blob that said “say cheese!” Finally, Hannah Zollman has left her mark on South Orange.
60. You never know where your next opportunities are going to come from. (This is a cheat. I knew this a long time ago)
61. Orange High School is looking to put murals all over their school. I learned this because one of the people I gave a card to while I was working is the principal and his assistant gave me a call later that morning. In the afternoon, I took a tour of the school and they’ve got hundreds of square feet of wall space that could be covered with murals!
62. Mural painting is an active activity. I got a couple good stretches in and had to balance myself between a flowerpot and a window frame and get down without my old ass falling over and embarrassing myself in front of the whole town.
63. When you do larger murals you use a scissor lift for this kind of thing. It’s now a goal in my life to rent a scissor lift.
64. I used tracing paper for the first time in forever. This method is great for typography and spot details of the mural.
65. Remember, when you’re projecting your design onto tracing paper in the basement, project it backwards so the image is correct when you apply it.
66. Pandr Design Co has great resources.
67. Natalie, Magie, and Sumana from Affordable arts are also great resources. So are Jess Cabato and Madeline Shaw. All these women are local muralists, artists, and friends of mine who I’m immensely grateful to for their advice. 🙌
68. Olga Muzician is one of the best local muralists. It’s awesome that she writes back to us locals when we reach out. See her stuff at Honey & Hive or Paper Plane or my About Town recreations of them in my book of illustrations.
69. Andy J Pizza, host of the podcast Creative Pep Talk, lives in Ohio. This is a podcast that Sumana recommended to me and is one of those resources that inspired me to take that leap into doing something I didn’t really know how to do - but knew I’d figure it out.
70. Andy J Pizza does not live in NYC like I had hoped, or LA as I assumed. Maybe some day he will come out to visit, but it’s not nearly as easy as a trip from NYC.
71. Andy J Pizza wrote back to me pretty quickly when I told him that I was making a pizza mural and it was slightly inspired by him.
72. We’re all just normal people. Some of us just have internet fame.
73. Major Lazer is a great soundtrack for mural painting. Who knew?
74. It can be very very meditative doing this. Especially if you’re trying to be conscious of your attention to detail. You need to take a deep breath, focus, and exhale while you paint your line. All while listening to very high octane music like Major Lazer, Reel Big Fish, or Rage Against the Machine. This is the only way, and if you’re listening to anything else, you’re doing it wrong.
75. People walk by and chat with you and give you compliments a lot. Compliments are great. Maybe I just need more validation 🤔
76. On the other hand, I’m a guy. Sometimes you’ll get creep dudes being creepy if you’re a woman doing this. I know this because all those women I mentioned above have said it’s happened to them. Please don’t do this, fellow dudes. Be better.
77. Murals being people joy.
78. Murals make towns safer. They have a positive impact on crime rates. When it’s apparent that a community has invested in public art like murals, the community at large benefits from the collective psychological idea that they should take care of the town they live in - to keep it beautiful and safe.
79. This is adjacent to broken windows theory which is a problematic theory - but mostly in its implementation. I am, of course, wildly paraphrasing here and possibly even thoroughly incorrect, but the whole topic deserves a blog post and some research of its own.
80. Spoiler alert: that research has been done, and all us muralists should be putting it in our pitch decks. Here’s one article from Philly to start with.
81. Murals are typically priced per square foot.
82. Supplies are on top of that.
83. I have no idea what I’m doing
84. I think I kinda actually know what I’m doing.
85. The direction you brush your brush strokes matters. For instance, if you look closely at the radiating background of the pizzas (and take a selfie and tag me while you’re there), you can see that the brush strokes are in line with the direction of those rays. It’s a very very subtle detail that adds to the cohesion of the entire piece.
86. It’s very tricky to get a consistent, level layer of paint. Often, paint will bead up around the edges of the brushstroke. You don’t want that! You want it to be flat & level & even. That takes practice and control. I’m far from an expert on that.
87. Folding chairs are decent to stand on or sit on, but really I should’ve had a small stepladder.
88. When you forget your folding chair a beach chair will work in a pinch, but fortunately I only had to sit on that for typography at the bottom.
89. Typography is an entirely different skill and I need to work on that a lot. I’ve already filled up a couple pages of a sketchbook with the alphabet using different tools. Much admiration for people who are good with letters.
90. Typography can be a ton of fun too. Those drippy paint markers look very rad when you throw stuff up. I messed around with them in my basement, and it’s yet another thing I’m going to practice a lot more of.
91. Sometimes the client changes their mind. Like the “say cheese” bit? Turns out they actually didn’t like that. At least I hadn’t put the varnish on yet, and can paint over it. It’s a simple fix. Sorry Hannah. You’re going to have to leave your mark on South Orange in some other way.
92. Every project I do now is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. That’s cool.
93. I should have a “murals” section of my website 🤔
94. 100 things is a lot of things. But again, things are easier to do if you like to hit goals.
95. Windows need to be cleaned very well before starting. I feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for facts here, but this is actually extremely important. Good thing I took some contemporaneous notes while researching all this.
96. I did not need rubber gloves at all. I got them, but I barely needed to use them.
97. I also did not need the cheap pair of Goodfellows shoes I got from Target. I thought I was going to be splattering paint everywhere, ruining my shoes. Turns out I’m kind of careful.
98. The full brimmed hat I bought looked kinda dumb. I don’t like it.
99. The Ken shirts I wore every day are clutch. 100% part of my branding now. Thank you, Mattel!
100. I have very much leveled up my art career. Not only is this an incredible portfolio piece for me, it’s also in a very high traffic area and has already gotten me attention. Even though it’s wildly different than watercolor, it wasn’t nearly as hard to accomplish as I thought it was going to be.

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