You’ll love this DIY Mexican-embroidery mural, whether you paint it in your house like I did or on a patio wall or a business. It simple, clean, and muy colorful. The idea here is the color does all the work for you. I partnered with Dunn Edwards for this project to show off their Curated Collection that features a vast arrays of gorgeous brights (my fave), neutrals and everything in between.
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll remember all the times we painted our living room. We’ve had it bright yellow, purple, even hot pink. The trouble with having all bright colored walls is its really hard to match furniture. Finally after all this time, we painted the entryway, the living room and the kitchen WHITE.
Clean, crisp milk.
This is the fireplace. We used plaster wrap to cover the brick to give it a stucco look. It is still pretty bumpy to paint on, but this design made it work.
I already knew I wanted a rainbow color story so I chose these colors from the Dunn Edwards Curated Collection – there are more than 200 colors to choose from! We have several locations here in Phoenix and they mixed up my cans and we picked them up!
This is a little crazy because I had all the colors, but then I kinda freaked out as to what to paint! After stalking a bunch of fabulous muralist on Instagram, I decided to go with what would make me feel happy in my house. It’s a very important factor – don’t paint something to fit with a trend, paint it to bring you joy. To make you feel inspired when you look at it. And then again, it’s only paint. Whenever you want to change it up, simple break open the paint cans again.
What I love is this this project barely took any paint. The colors are so rich and opaque, they went on with one coat. Some of the textured wall area needed a bit more attention, but from base coats to shading, each layer went on smoothly.
Okay, let me tell you how to do this!
SUPPLIES for a DIY Mexican-Embroidery Mural
Drawing for your mural
Laptop and projector
Pencil
Assorted paint brushes
Small mixing cups, toothpicks
Drop cloth
Paper towels
DIRECTIONS:
First thing, I started with an illustration I drew in Procreate. You can use a design or pattern, whatever you’d like! If you don’t have Procreate, sketch your design on paper and use markers or paint to color it. Then take a picture of it and pull it up on your laptop. Before you paint anything, look at it on the wall and see if you like it!
Or you can always freehand if you feel brave!
I then connected my laptop to a projector, turned off the lights, and aimed it at the fireplace. It took a bit of adjusting for placement, I went back and forth with my image on PicMonkey (it’s a free online photo editing app) to angle it just right.
Use a pencil or washable marker to draw out the design. Be sure not to move your projector!
After you have the design on the wall, turn off the laptop and projector, and start by filling in the stems, vines, leaves with a dark green. Let it all dry, then add highlights with the lighter green.
While those greens dry, add the base color of the flowers. Keep taking turns adding color and highlights. I always end up with about 5-6 different colors on each flower, but you can keep it simple if it’s easier.
TIP: Pick up some 2 ounce sauce cups to use to hold your paint. This will cut down on waste and you can easily mix colors.
Speaking of colors – check these out! They look sooo juicy!
These are semi-gloss. you can use them as is or add white to create different shades. A little goes a long way.
Once you have all your base colors down, go in with different colors to add highlights and shading. If you don’t want all bright, use neutrals and add little pops of color as you wish.
Of course, my inspo was Mexican embroidery.
I can’t get enough of it. This reminds me of a crisp white blouse. Great all year round!
I love this mural! As you can see, we are still working on decorating. We bought a large white entertainment center and next we are working on buying a teal couch. It’s finally all coming together!
Don’t forget to check out Dunn-Edwards Curated Colors collection.
And thank you so much to them for bringing me on for this partnership and to all of you for reading this post!
Love your article but your link to the curated colors paint collection linked me to a weird site. Sex oriented site, it looked like.
I just checked and it worked for me, which link? I don’t see it, Oh my gosh!!!
This is a great idea that can be adapted to any image.
I cannot believe you painted over those tiles along the trim of the fireplace opening
We can always remove it if/when we want….