How to Create a Mario Wall Mural My husband has been fan of Super Mario Bros for over 25 years.

So you better believe when my oldest son told us he wanted us to redo his room in a Mario theme my husband was completely gung ho for it. I just wanted to slap up some Mario decals around his room (in a nice fashion of course), but my husband had a much larger project in mind. My husband decided he wanted to paint the entire first world (1-1) of Super Mario Bros. on my sons walls. To be honest I had some doubts about how well this would turn out but it came out amazing! My husband did a wonderful job! Do you want to create an amazing Super Mario Bros. Mural on your kid's walls? Here's how... Determine the Room Scale 1. Measure the total wall space that you will be working with (excluding doors, windows, ect.). Make sure all of the measurements are in inches. 2. Choose the world that you would like to replicate on your walls. We chose Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. 3. Count the total number of blocks that make up the world including pitfalls. The easiest way to do this is to count the ground bricks because they span nearly the entire world. To determine the width of the pitfalls I used Microsoft Paint to cut out a ground brick and overlay it on a pitfall to see how many blocks worth a pitfall was. One pitfall equals two ground blocks. World 1-1 had 210 blocks including pitfalls. 4. To determine the scale that you will be using divide the total number of inches of wall space (step 1) by the total number of blocks (step 3). My scale turned out to be 2.41 inches which would have made painting some of the world's details extremely hard. 5. To increase the scale to something more appropriate (while in Microsoft Paint) I looked for spaces in the world where I could just remove ground bricks without affecting the integrity of the original image. I decided that I wanted to make my the scale roughly 3 inches so I removed around 41 blocks to accomplish this.

6. Removing these blocks allowed me to go from a 2.41 inch scale to a 3

inch scale. This was perfect for me but you can tweak this to your own needs. Create the Stencils 1. Look at the original image and determine what stencils you need to create. For example, I created stencils for hills, clouds, bricks, pipes, mushrooms, the turtle, castle, bushes, goombas...in other words for pretty much everything. 2. After identifying all of the items I needed to make stencils for I determined that the single ground brick would be my basic Comparing Tool. I used Microsoft Paint to cut out one of the Ground bricks. I then compared it to each of the items I needed to make a stencil for. Since each ground brick was going to be 3 inches wide by 3 inches tall I was able to determine the size of the items I needed to create a Stencil for. For example, I determined that the small pipe was 2 ground bricks wide by 2 ground bricks tall. This meant that the Small Pipe was 6 inches by 6 inches. Do this for all of the items you need to create a stencil for. 3. Create a grid on a piece of poster board. To do this I pulled up a single ground brick in Microsoft Paint and expanded it to 3 inches by 3 inches when holding a ruler up to the computer screen. 4. Once the image was enlarged in Paint I was able to easily see that a ground brick was made up of a 16 x 16 grid. I put my ruler up to the screen and measured the distance for each grid block to determine the size of my gridlines on the poster board. This grid allowed me to easily drawn all the shapes and items that I needed to create Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Picking the Paint Colors This whole project was all my husbands doing but I did have one tiny part in his amazing mural. I got to choose the paint colors for everything (Exciting I know!). We printed enlarged portions of the below picture and matched them to paint samples at Wal-Mart. I had fun trying to match the colors as close as I could to the printed images.

All of the paints we used were purchased at Wal-Mart. We used Color Place brand (for most of the paint) of flat paint because it was the cheapest per gallon. It might not be the best quality but we did not have the money to spend on top quality paint especially when we had to buy gallons and gallons of paint. I think the paint we used turned out just fine! If you want to use the exact paint colors we did here are the paint codes you can take into Wal-Mart to achieve them.

Black: Basic Premixed Flat Black Dark Green 1. KX 1Y 16 2. AXX 9Y 15 3. D 27 4. E 38 White: Basic Pre Mixed Flat White Brown: Orange Sienna Better Homes and Gardens Interior Flat Highlight White: Flowering Babys Breath 5. C 2 6. L 6 7. R 4 Orange: True Royal Love 8. KX 3Y 24 9. AXX 7Y 19 10. L 15 11. V 37 Light Green 12. KX 3Y 33 13. AXX 7Y 30 14. D 11 15. E 20 Gold

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16. KX 1Y 14 17. R 37 18. T 9Y 44 Sky Blue: Blue Sausalito Bay 19. B 22 20. D 2 21. E 2Y 38

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Red: Sorry, for some reason we dont have a name or color code for the red paint. Painting Time Yay! The fun part! Painting has to be the most fun part of this project other than seeing the finished product. 1. The first thing you need to do is determine how high on the wall you need to start the mural in order to keep the proportions. I took my basic block and determined how many blocks high the world was. I determined that it would be about 12 blocks high or about 6 feet. In the room that I was painting the walls were 9 feet high so I started my ground bricks about 3 feet from the ground. 2. Next, I measured around the room making marks at 3 and 4 feet off of the ground. I used a chalk line to make straight lines at the 3 and 4 foot marks. I then put painters tape right above the 3 foot line and just below the 4 foot line all the way around the room. All of the area above the 4 foot line was painted sky blue and the area below the 3 foot line was painted black. Note: You dont have to paint the bottom half of the room black if you dont want to. We just choose black to make the rest of the world pop. 3. After the black and the sky blue areas dried I then placed painters tape just below the 3 foot line and just above the 4 foot line. The area in between this tape was then painted brown. 4. Once the brown area dried I covered all of it with painters tape. After covering the brown area with tape I begin to draw out the squares for the ground bricks. I use my ground brick stencil and place it on top of the painters tape and traced around the outside. I repeated this step until I created the outline of all of the ground bricks on the tape.

5. Next I start to plan where I was going to place all of the other elements of the world. Looking at my original picture and using the ground blocks as a guide I started to place the elements that appeared in the sky blue area. After locating the general area for an element I would cover that small area with painters tape and trace the outline of each item on the painters tape. 6. Then I cut off one part of the stencil and went around to every block where that item would be placed to trace on the new part of the element. After all of the elements were updated on the wall I then cut out a little more of the shape and trace that part onto the proper area on the wall. I continue with this process until I went through all of the stencils and copied all of them onto their proper spot on the wall. This resulted in all of the stencils being drawn on the painters tape that we placed on the wall in step 5. 7. The next step is to start painting each of the elements on the wall. I picked an element and found the inner most section of the drawing. I used a razor knife to cut out this shape and remove the tape exposing the wall. Then I painted the proper color in the newly exposed wall. Work your way around the room exposing one piece of each element at a time and then paint it. Warning: You will be finding bits of painters tape for a long time and all throughout your house. I still occasionally find painters tape stuck to a sock and the room has been done now for about 4 months. 8. Once the paint dries you can start removing the next portion of the tape using a razor knife and start painting it. You will remove the tape and start painting from the inside out of every element until you complete all of the elements to finish the mural. This whole process (Part 1 & 2) took my husband about 4 months to do so it is not a quick project by any means. Thats not bad considering he mainly painted at night and on weekends only. The end result was more than worth it though! He loved the finished product so much that a Zelda mural may be in his future. Written by Krystle with Home Jobs by MOM