Use bright, vibrant colors for a child's bedroom mural.
Children love trains. Trains are big, loud, shiny and exciting, and it doesn't matter if you're a boy or a girl, if you love trains, you want one. Go ahead and paint a bright, cheery train mural on your child's bedroom wall, and involve her fully in the design, painting and the choices of colors. As a bonus, participating in the planning of her bedroom can stimulate her intellectual development as well as instill a sense of pride in and responsibility for her own living space.
Instructions
1. Pull out pictures of trains in children's magazines and storybooks, and ask him which he prefers and why. Encourage him to visualize his favorite train as a mural on his wall, and explain the basics to him in terms of shape and color. Take your own skills into consideration; reproducing an intricate painting of the American history of rail might be more of a challenge than painting a pull-along wooden engine.
2. Give your child a ruler and help her measure the width of the area of wall to be painted, planning it at the lower part of the wall so she can reach it when helping you paint the train. Help her measure the depth of the painting area.
3. Draw a to-scale rectangle on paper, with 1 inch equivalent to 6 inches. Draw a rectangle where your child wants his train on the wall, dividing it into 6-inch grid squares.
4. Use color pencils to sketch a train on the paper grid, asking your child to tell you what she wants, such as big wheels, a fat engine, or a smiley face on the front. Ask her to tell you which colors she wants to use and how many cars on the train. She might want to paint in flowers or animals along the side of the railway track, and people waving.
5. Transfer the design in each 1-inch grid of the drawing into each 6-inch grid on the wall, using soft pencil. Let your child help, showing him where to draw the lines. Congratulate him at each stage! Don't worry about errors, as these can be erased and redrawn or painted over.
6. Lay a dust sheet out to protect the floor or carpet, and give your child a waterproof apron and a floppy artist's hat. Outline each separate section of the train in paint with a 1/2-inch brush, such as the wheels, the train cars, windows and the engine, leaving a space in the middle of each. Help her paint within each space and build up the train section by section.
7. Allow each section to dry before painting next to it, to prevent runs and smudges. Don't worry about achieving a perfect train if your child wants to add blobs of strange colors or aliens driving the engine -- this is his room, and his pride in achievement and ownership is worth more than showroom perfection.
8. When you have both finished the mural and it is completely dry, get your child to sign the mural with her name. Help her with the letters if she is still learning to write. Take a photograph of her standing next to her train! Ask her to help you clear up the painting equipment so that she understands the whole process of planning a wall painting.
