Going Big: The Art of Large-Scale Mural Painting
- Admin
- Mar 9
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 9
Large scale mural paintings are no easy feat to achieve. Bala Creative founder Maxfield Bala compares the jump from standard mural painting to large scale mural painting like the jump from Canvas painting to mural painting. The process of going really big with a mural painting requires a new set of techniques, equipment, and way of thinking when painting murals. Small brush strokes and tiny spray caps are replaced with airless spray guns, 5" wide brushes, and super fat spray caps. leaning your head back to view the walls composition turns into a short walk in order to view the wall from a distance. Ladders and step stools are replaced by articulating boom lifts, leveraging you over 50' high. Small details on a mural that might be one foot in height, quickly become five feet in height. It's this combination of factors that make large scale mural painters a unique breed comparative to those painting smaller murals.
When we began painting large scale murals it was a gradual process. smaller 8' x 8' walls became 10' x 20' walls that become 15' x 30' walls and ultimately walls over 30' x 100' walls. We slowly learned to go larger and larger with our murals inheriting technique after technique on the way. Building our skill sets to become proficient in safety, skill, and equipment catalog. Going from only using ladders to an articulating boom lift is quite the jump but going from a ladder to a small scissor lift is much easier. likewise, hoping from from blending with small brushes to a multicolor airless spray set up is a big jump. It can take years before your able to master these skills at a high level.
Our founder Maxfield Bala painted homes for years while emerging as a young artist in the San Francisco Bay area and learned more production style techniques towards the preparation and painting of large scale surfaces that have transcended into our large scale mural paintings. When commencing a large scale mural painting its important to understand that garbage in is garbage out, A wall not properly prepped through power washing, sanding and cleanings paired with a high quality primer can destroy a mural painting before its even finished. However a wall properly prepped can allow the large scale mural painting to last for decades. The primer and/ or block filler paint will serve as the glue that helps bind your paint to the wall and help create a smoother surface for enhanced blending.
Large scale pieces can require additional attention during the development process due to their scale and visibility. Theres no doubt that even small murals can invoke wonder, curiosity and even some backlash. Large scale works amplify those feelings and can drastically alter the entire feel of a neighborhood due to their encompassing size. We always recommend painting murals that are from the heart and take into account the environment and community. Input on these pieces are often welcomed and will ultimately create a piece thats celebrated both by the artist and those members who see it every day. Take some extra time to understand that the images in the mock up you create might be stories tall and carry a whole new meaning to some because of their size.
Painting large scale murals require the same materials as large scale murals. Its more about the equipment used to apply said materials. Use the same brushes, spray tips, and ladders your using on a small mural and you will find yourself taking ten times longer to paint the mural with less than satisfactory results. Blends that span 8' in length just simply don't work with small scale equipment. Just like hauling paint up and down an extension ladder just doesn't work compared to the large scale painting platform of a scissor lift. Successful mural painters understand efficiency in safety, techniques, and application in regards to equipment. You can still use your favorite house paints, spray cans, and clear coats, just make sure your equipment allows you to go large scale.
Perspective changes when painting a large scale mural. The idea of painting remains the same but expect to use more of your body when painting at this scale. The line work that requires only a flick of the wrist on a smaller scale piece become a leg squat paired with full arm extension. Take the time to walk back on your piece and view the mural from multiple angles as you progress on a piece of this scale. Ensure you apply a roadmap, or doodle grid so you can understand your location on the wall. Knowing where to apply color becomes trickier when visual sketch markers are out of site. If the piece looks almost messy from close up thats ok. Your expanding on details to a unique scale that when viewed from far away or almost unseen or contribute to the realism. Finally understand your working up stories up in the air. Take the time to become lift certified, wear harnesses, and apply best practices to ensure you, your team, and those passerby's or kept safe from falling hazards. Going big means thinking bigger than normal from a safety perspective. Know that large scale murals take time to paint. At first doubling the scale, of your work will mean double the time to create the piece. However once the techniques and equipment are inherited, the large scale mural becomes only fractionally more time consuming than a smaller wall.
Maxfield Bala Creative LLC has painted dozens of large scale mural painting in the United States. We're fully licensed contractors with the insurance and team often required by companies to paint at such a large outdoor walls. With over ten years of experience we specialize in custom murals developed by Maxfield Bala and our team and the recreation of to specification artwork designated by the client. Here are a few big murals we've painted:
Our mission working with We. Create Artist Gathering and the city of Sand City was to develop and paint a large scale mural painting during the week long mural festival taking place from August 23- August 30th, 2021. We collaborated with Colorado based artist Pat Milbery and Monterey based artist Hannah Brimmer on this huge mural spanning just over 60 feet wide and 25 feet tall. The mural depicts a variety of local animals including the Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Ringtail Cat, Great Blue Heron, Allen's Hummingbird, Leatherback Turtle and the Monarch Butterfly among an assortment of plant life and an abstract landscape of the Monterey Bay. The scene is seemingly made visible through the building cracking bricks revealing the nature bursting through. Lead muralist Maxfield Bala painted the wildlife area's while Pat Milbery painted the landscape scenes. The mural was painted over the course of one week in the center of Sand City, California.
Our Mission was to create a gigantic commercial mural advertisement for the world renown Lagunitas Brewing Company in Las Vegas, Nevada. The wall itself was an aggregate rock wall leaving us with the task of conquering the tricky surface and turning it into a work of art. The mural features the Lagunitas text logo in the companies signature purple color. Each letter stands over 20' tall. To the right the companies "knock out" character punches a 25' tall Lagunitas IPA bottle through the wall as it cracks and crumbles away. The outdoor mural advertisement spans over 130' wide and 30' tall making for it one of the cities largest sign paintings to date. Completed in under five days to meet a tight deadline this mural painting is seen and photographed by thousands of highway and street side passerby's everyday. This mural is located Right next to the Shelby Carroll Car Museum and just off the Las Vegas Strip this exterior wall. Makes us thirty just thinking about it!
Our mission working with the Bay Area Air Quality Management district, Spare the Air campaign, Allison and Partners and Bay Street Emeryville was to create a large scale mural painting to beautify the Bay Street Campus in collaboration with supporting the Spare the Air campaign. The Air District’s goal is to keep the air for Bay Area residents safe, by encouraging alternative options to single car trips. In the city of Emeryville, we’d like to remind passersby that the Bay Area is an active, inclusive community, with so many accessible options for making your commute and transportation healthier for all (walk, bike, train, bus, ferry, or even a hybrid of bike+mass transit. Keeping this idea in mind we strategically developed a concept to fit a dynamic mural that would work for all parties involved. The proposed site featured a vast variety of surface levels, surface materials and obstructions like doors, vents, railings and lights. These factors called for a dynamic mural design with strategically placed images in order to remove image distortion and effectively promote the values of our artistic vision and the Spare the Air campaign. Through multiple design rounds with input from the Mayor of Emeryville we landed on a colorful design paying homage to the relationship of public transit's ability to create a cleaner environment friendly to the bay area's natural habitats and wildlife. This included the feature of active modes of transportation like bike riding, cycling and electric scooter riding along with more traditional modes like the bus or train. Moving from left to right the mural features a Monarch butterfly and bicycle rider. A rider enters an electric double decker bus as a Great Blue Heron flies by. A cyclist looks back onto reeds breaking way to a Pelican. The mayor of Emeryville's dog pokes in head out from the bottom of the scene while an electric scooter rider paces down the bay front pathway. A Plover bird native to the local wetlands spread its wings aside a California Golden Poppy flower and a large Spare the Air logo. A man takes his bike off the train to the right of this logo while bold colors layered upon one another help to create movement, and depth throughout the mural. The mural took three weeks to complete and spans 110' wide and over 13' tall and was clear coated with an anti graffiti coating to have it outlast the elements. The mural is a permanent installation in Emeryville, California and was painted by our lead muralist, Maxfield Bala in conjunction with our mural team.
Our mission with USGS was to create a mural painting for their new labroatory at the NASA Moffet Field facility in Mountain View, California. The mural spans across two stories and amongst a sprawling staircase to measure at roughly 55'0"W X 25'0"H. The mural painting itself features a topographic map of the magestic Yosemite Valley complete with river designations and a map directory. The map itself was translated to specification per the requests of the USGS team.
The Largest of the mural paintings at the Agrihood housing development is a three story corrugated metal water tower. The curved water tower required a series of unique design and painting techniques in order to properly develop and transfer the mural design. The mural paintings design features a series of local wildlife including a great blue heron and Monarch Butterflies among Apricot blossoms and other local flowers. The murals required two months to paint and were treated with a series of protective UV and graffiti resistant clear coats to protect and preserve the murals for years to come.
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