When people see a mural on a wall, they usually only notice the finished painting. What they don’t see is the months of work, planning, and approval that happen before the first brushstroke even touches the wall. 

This semester, I am working on painting a mural at Darien High School, and the process is much more involved than I originally expected. What seems like a simple art project actually takes an entire semester of preparation, design, and execution. 

The first step in creating the mural is designing and painting a full mockup that is exactly to scale. Before I am allowed to paint anything on the wall in the school, I have to create a smaller version of the mural that shows exactly what the final piece will look like. Every color, shape, and detail needs to be planned out ahead of time so that the final painting can be executed correctly. 

Talking to fellow mural students, I mentioned “I didn’t realize how hard it would be to scale everything up from a small sketch to a wall, it’s way more precise than it looks.”

Creating the mockup takes a significant amount of tim because it serves as both a test run and a proposal. It allows teachers and administrators to see the design and understand what the mural will look like before anything permanent is painting onto the school walls. 

After completing the mockup, the next step is getting approval from school administration. Because the mural will be painted directly onto a wall in the building, it needs to be reviewed and approved by the vice principal before the project can move forward. This step ensures that the design fits the environment of the school and that the location chosen for the mural is appropriate (specifically so that the wall a muralist plans to paint on isn’t getting knocked down during construction in the next few years). 

Once the mural design receives approval, the next stage of the process begins: transferring the design onto the wall itself. This part requires carefully sketching the entire myral onto the wall before any paint is applied. The sketch acts as a guide for the final painting and helps make sure that the proportions match the original mockup. Even though the mockup is smaller, the design still has to translate accurately onto a much larger surface. 

Sketching the mural onto the wall can be one of the most challenging parts of the process because everything has to line up correctly. If the proportions or placement are slightly off from the original mockup, it can affect the entire final painting. 

With respect to student experiences, Senior, Alina Shahzad, noted “the biggest challenges of scaling and sketching my mural has been precision because I’m a perfectionist and need my lines to be straight and everything symmetrical or everyones eyes on it asking me how its going which is a lot of pressure.”

Once the full outline is sketched, I can finally begin painting. Painting a mural is very different from working on a regular canvas because of the scale of the project. Large sections have to be painted slowly and carefully, and layers of color need to be built up over time. What might take minutes on a small painting can take hours on a wall sized surface. 

The entire process takes not only class every other day, but also working during almost every single free period available for the entire semester to finish the piece. 

Because of the amount of work involved in each step of the process, the entire project takes a full semester to complete. Despite the challenges, the process has been incredibly rewarding. Creating a mural that will remain in the school long after I graduate is a unique opportunity. Most art projects eventually get taken down or stored away, but a mural becomes part of the space itself. 

With respect to student experiences, Neev Sahgal noted that “murals beautify the school and allow for colors in otherwise dull walls.”

Our school is not the only school with this rare opportunity, other schools also offer students to paint murals, as several articles have pointed out, like this one in Florida: https://www.alligator.org/article/2026/04/eastside-mural-unveiling.

Knowing that future students will walk past something I created every day makes the project meaningful in a way that most assignments don’t. By the end of the semester, the blank wall I started on will be completely transformed. What began as a sketch and a scaled mockup will become a finished mural that becomes part of Darien High School itself.