How To Create a DIY Mountain Mural for a Nursery

Posted in Home, Pregnancy and Baby.

Since I posted about our finished nursery, I’ve had quite a few requests for a how-to for the mountain mural. So here it is! Read on for more…

mountain mural for girls nursery
Rob and I are not the most handy of people – the extent of our decorating experience before this was painting one wall of our kitchen, which resulted in some very unsightly blotches on the ceiling. So before starting the mountain mural, we weren’t filled with confidence about our DIY skills… but turns out, this is a super easy project to suit all levels of skill!

To start with, we prepped the room that was to become the nursery. After cleaning top to bottom and washing the carpet we used a primer paint on the walls to cover the existing colour (a dark grey), gave the ceiling a fresh coat of eggshell white and painted all the woodwork.

nursery mountain mural diy
I wanted to keep the nursery gender neutral in soft pastel shades, but I didn’t want the mountain theme to look too realistic. So rather than choosing blue for the main wall colour, I went for a gentle green – Farrow & Ball’s Cromarty. It’s a beautiful green with a hint of grey and works so well to create a calming atmosphere… perfect for a nursery.

With the walls and radiator painted and dry, it was time to start plotting out the mountain range!

nursery mountain mural DIY
instructions for painting nursery mountain muralThis is where I handed over to Rob. He sketched out his idea on paper first, then recreated the layout on the walls using masking tape. Rob came up with theee most adorable meaning for each peak – the big ones represent him, me and Baby A, and the smaller ones on the side walls are for our cats, Travis and Lily. I almost wept when he explained that bit to me!

We didn’t want the peaks to look too uniform, so we did a bit of shuffling about once the tape was up – stepping back and surveying the overall scene helped. Once we were happy with the layout Rob trimmed the excess tape, making sure the points of each mountain were sharp.

It’s really important to use a good quality decorators’ tape here – you need a really crisp line and cheaper tape will bleed. A top tip is to rub over the tape with a damp cloth to really seal the glue and make sure the paint stays where you want it to!

gender neutral mountain mural nurseryThis is how things looked after we’d painted the main peaks and the background peaks. We gave each section two coats to ensure an even finish, waiting about 20 mins between coats. Then we waited another 20 mins before crossing our fingers and peeling off the masking tape – success! No leakage!

We stuck with Farrow & Ball colours for the mountains. I wanted soft greys with a warm tone and settled on Pavilion Grey for the background peaks and Dove Grey for the foreground peaks. I love the combination of these two colours against the pastel green.

step by step nursery mountain mural
paint your own nursery mountain muralNext step – filling in the gaps. For this part, we waited until the paint was touch-dry then lined up the masking tape with the edge of the foreground mountains, making sure to add an extra piece of tape to complete the side of the background peaks. It’s quite complicated to explain but hopefully the pics make sense!

With the masking tape in place and dampened down, we painted within the lines to complete the background mountains.

how to paint a baby nursery
gender neutral baby nurseryThe final stage was to paint the snowy peaks – we mapped these out with more tape while waiting for the background peaks to dry a bit, then slapped on a few coats of Farrow & Ball’s Wimbourne White. We could’ve actually done this way back at step one when we painted the main foreground peaks, just by adding the additional tape then rather than painting the grey colour right to the top of each peak. But, no harm done – 3 coats and the grey was as pure as snow. 20 minutes later it was time to peel off the masking tape with fingers firmly crossed…

scandi style baby nurseryTada! It worked!

We finished the mountain mural about 2 months ago and I’m still so delighted with it. It’s not totally perfect – some of the lines are a little shaky and there’s a tiny bit of cracking in the white paint because we layered it on too thickly. But none of that matters (or is even visible unless you’re up close) – it looks fantastic and I’m so proud of us DIY newbies for doing it all ourselves.

It really was a very easy project, and the finished result looks way more professional than I expected. For a couple of first-timers, I think we really smashed it! Here are a few tips if you’d like to paint your own mountain mural…

– It’s time-consuming, but don’t rush it. Set aside a full weekend and give yourself enough drying time

– Use good quality paint and decent brushes. You want an even finish without the stray brush hairs!

– Buy the best masking/decorators’ tape you can find. We found the blue stuff was the best, and a rub-over with a damp cloth strengthens the glue even more.

– Sketch out your mountain scene first and use your sketch as a reference for the wall. Don’t make it too formal or uniform, and don’t worry if your peaks aren’t perfectly straight!

pastel mountain mural nursery

6 Comments

Sarahmia

This is so adorable, Jen! 🙂

Another tip for painters tape we recently learned is to do a coat of base colour over the edge of the tape before you do your actual colour – it makes the lines super crisp (and is what we did for our yellow half wall on the stairs recently 🙂 )

x

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Chelsea

We’ve just created a mountain mural for our nursery and couldn’t agree more about the quality painters tape! We started off with Wilkos own and it was peeling off the paint from the day before, meaning lots of touch ups were needed. We also found removing the tape as soon after painting the edges, so while the paint was still wet helped make sure it didn’t bleed/pull dry paint off!

Can be a little stressful and time consuming but you’re absolutely right, the result is amazing.

We too are fairly novice DIY-ers and are so proud with the results.

Yours looks so lovely!

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Catherine

The whole nursery is just absolutely beautiful, you’ve done such a good job! I’m not usually a fan of murals but this is stunning, I love it!

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Anita

I’m about 5 months behind you and have been reading your posts with interest regarding maternity wear etc, I’m still in my ‘normal’ clothes at the moment but love your tips for where to buy maternity clothes, so thank you! And I’m totally giving this mural a go in our nursery, love a crafty DIY challenge, it’s right up my street… how hard can it be! Ha! Thanks again for your posts!

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Jen

Congratulations, Anita! So glad you’re enjoying the blog posts. Hope I’ll be able to keep them up once Baby A arrives and give you an insight to the ‘other side’! 😉 x

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