Milan Mural
In 2019, I travelled to Milan in the heat of summer to create a mural in a large, traditional Italian home. I worked alongside the owner to create a bespoke design for a feature wall in her bedroom. On arrival, there was some confusion, the client thought the design was going to be in colour, whereas I thought we were going for a black and white design. As is often the case with client relationships, working together to overcome this issue helped us to build a stronger working relationship. One Photoshop mock up later, and a trip to a hardware shop, we'd bought the colour paint and I began preparing the room.
This was the first mural I've done at this scale, and we found another obstacle to overcome. I couldn't find a way to reach the higher parts of the wall. One long walk around Milan asking every shop and gallery if they could lend me a ladder, I struck lucky and the wine shop down the road kindly lent me theirs.
Next, I sugar soaped the wall and then painted it matte white to ensure I've had the best possible canvas. Then, I drew a grid on the wall, the fastest way to do this is first measure the space, then divide it by ten each direction (which I'd already done to my small mock up). Then make two "rulers" that are exactly the size of a tenth (landscape and portrait). This way I could very quickly grid up the wall, for this project it didn't have to be correct to the milimetre, as botanical designs are very forgiving.
I then started blocking out the colours, I wasn't too worried about the edges being perfectly smooth as I was to draw over the top of them. I used standard wall paint for affordability and durability.
Once all the paint blocks had been added, I began with my Posca pens. I used three different sizes, a very small pen for shading and adding fine detail, a medium sized pen for the main line work, and a very large pen to add bold outlines. This is useful to create a hierarchy. At the beginning, I used a pencil to sketch out the line work but as I became more confident I drew directly on top on the paint work. Once, I made a mistake and had to paint over the pen back to the original colour block. This worked fine and was reassuring to know I had a kind of rubber if I made any mistakes.
I then used a spray varnish to seal the mural and protect it.
The client and I were both very pleased with the final piece. It took me three very long days to complete and it was a great experience. I hope to work on more large scale work in the future and use this experience to push my mural designs to the next level. If you are interested in working together on a mural, please send me an email at marthaniadesign@gmail.com. I'm currently based in the UK and willing to travel for exciting projects!
