How to Paint a Mountain Mural on your Bedroom or Nursery Wall | DIY Timelapse + Speed Painting

Dear crafters,

Have you ever considered adding your own, custom touch to your room's walls?

My husband and I decided to try it out by painting a mountain range as an accent wall in one of our bedrooms.  We wanted to pick a scene that would remind us of nature that beautiful, woodsy Pacific Northwest sort of feel.  We thought of painting a forest, but it seemed a little ambitious in terms of artistic talent.  We thought of doing some grassy hills, and then decided on a neutral mountain range that varied in peaks and shades!

This was our first time painting any sort of image on our walls, and I had to admit, I was pretty nervous about it.  I've painted before, but only on paper and canvas, and I wasn't sure what to expect with a project like this.  I worry about messing up the wall, but my husband convinced me that we could always cover up our mistakes with a new layer of paint.

Whew, it's nice having a back-up plan as the big "undo" button that I desperately need in real life!

In the words of Bob Ross: "No mistakes, just HAPPY ACCIDENTS"!  

With that, we decided to go for it and bought two quarts of Valspar paint: one very light grey ("Ghost Ship"), and one very dark grey ("Night View").

Here's a clearer look at the colors, taken from the Valspar website.

I got a regular-Joe pencil and sketched out the shape of our mountain ranges.  We wanted to have some layering and depth, so I drew a total of six different layers.  Since we aimed for an organic, natural-type of look, I used that as an excuse for all my lines to be wobbly... :)

Just for the record, I can NOT draw a straight line for the life of me!

My husband then set up the room so that it was ready for painting.  To do so you, you'll probably want to look up some tutorials or Youtube videos to explain how that's done.  My husband, for example, used blue tape along the ceiling edge and bottom edge (to cover the crown molding), as well as the left and right edges of the wall.  He also had brown paper covering the floor to keep our paint splatters from making a mess of the room.

After that, we were ready to paint!

We opened the light grey can of paint and painted the sky without mixing the color at all.

Giving the sky layer a few moments to dry, we then poured a bit of the dark grey paint into the light grey can of paint.  The key is to add just a bit of dark grey at a time, because remember: you can always go darker, but you can't go lighter!

We stirred the mixture until the color had become an even shade, now slightly darker than the sky's light grey.  We then painted the first layer of the mountain.

Once that first layer was done, we went back to mix a bit of that dark grey into the lighter shade.  Repeating the process, we painted the second layer of the mountain.

This process of mixing a slightly darker grey, and then painting on a closer layer of the mountain range, continued!

While we followed the pencil sketch of the mountain range for the most part, little and clumsy mistakes were and there ended up not being very noticeable at all.  After all, the mountains didn't have an exact shape to fill; it was all natural and however we wanted it to be! 

Finally, we were finished with ALL the mountain layers!  After letting the wall dry, this is what it looked like:

It turned out to be a lot of fun!  The other walls in the room were left in their original colors in our photos, but we ended up painting them in a light grey to match with the more neutral tone of the accent wall.

Check out our video below to see the painting in action!  It's a start-to-finish, time-lapse perspective of our painting technique (or lack thereof)...

These simple steps can help you achieve a clean, professional look, just like the results you’d get from professional painting services.

Thanks for reading (or watching), and hope this has been helpful to anyone who's looking to create a lovely set of mountain ranges on the wall!

Happy crafting and DIY-ing!

Warm regards,