I am very proud to share the tree mural I painted for Gabriel’s room. I just love it and even though it was a HUGE amount of work. I do SOSOSOSO LOVE it. I’m also so super proud of myself. I originally saw this tree done on Just a girl’s blog and just knew this is what I wanted to do in Gabriel’s room. Check out how I did it so you can too.

Gabriel’s tree mural tutorial

I found this picture of the tree mural on etsy and printed it out on A3 paper. I placed a piece of plastic over top of my photocopy and used a permanent marker to draw the tree onto the plastic (check out the two amazing Stephanie Alexander books I’m using to keep the plastic flat).

I borrowed an OHP (old school!!) from John’s kindy and taped the plastic drawn tree to the top so I could project the tree onto the wall. The OHP hadn’t been used in a long time so the image it projected wasn’t super clear so I had to do a lot of the tree free handed. I used white chalk to draw the image onto the wall. Once I had completed the tree from as much of the OHP image as I could see I kept adding more and more branches and leaves until the whole wall was covered with my tree. I used a good quality brush to paint the leaves and branches. I painted straight over top of the chalk using the chalk outline as the edges for my tree (don’t worry too much if you go over the edges but try to stay within otherwise the leaves get too big).

I used VOC-free water based Resene paint in Alabaster that I had leftover from the bathroom.

I found it easier to draw the edges and outline then go back and fill them in a section at a time. As you can see my handy work is pretty rough as I’m not an artist at all (but my tree still looks awesome!)

Here is my work in progress. It took me a long time to finish my tree with two small children trying to “help”. I did two coats of paint to get a nice crisp white finish. Since my edges are a little rough if you wanted to you could use a thinner brush and go over the edges of the tree to give a crisper finish. After a few days when the paint was completely dry I used a cloth to wipe off all the chalk outlines. Tada!!! Here is my finished masterpiece. I am very proud of my tree and just LOVE it. There were moments there when I wasn’t sure it was going to be completed but I am so glad I finished it!!!