Best Materials for Mural Painting Development
What Are The Best Materials and Equipment To Use For Mural Painting Development?
Bala Creative is one of the top mural companies in the United States painting murals across the globe for clients like Samsung, Coca-Cola, and Sony. We're here to provide our expertise to make your mural painting development more effective using our recommended materials and equipment. It's critical in our opinion that an artist has a solid understanding of the proper materials and equipment to use when developing a mural project. We always like to say "Garbage in is garbage out"- Meaning that garbage materials and equipment can lead to garbage results that result in wasted hours. We're here to help artists looking to branch out from their canvas artwork onto monster walls that grace the city streets. Below we will list our top materials and equipment for developing a mural design.
Best equipment, software, and materials for mural development:
No longer are the days of paper and pencil sketching when developing a mural painting. Today's atmosphere calls for the ability for ideas to quickly flow, revisions to be easily made, and the client to view the mural concept seamlessly and professionally over email. In order to accomplish this task Bala Creative switched from the timely process of hand drawn paper sketches to digital renderings created on drawing tablets. Paper sketches in the past cost us hundreds of hours when revisions needed to be made. This often meant starting from scratch to render the requested change orders and offering a product that wasn't always color accurate or too specification.
The Wacom Cintiq 22' or the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24' is our preferred equipment when developing a mural project. The large drawing surface upwards to 24" wide will allow you the creative freedom to create your mural concepts effectively and efficiently. It was truly amazing how quickly this allowed us to take on more clients, financially benefit, and work with some of our dream clients. Designs came faster, more brilliant and more professional than before the use of the Wacom Cintiq. While expensive these tablets are worth every cent and offer the most professional results and are the industry standard for the world's top illustrators, graphic designs, animators and development companies. With a parallel surface feel, program compatibility and an HD resolution we would be lost without this tablet in our
arsenal. Change order? No problem, a few quick edits to our photoshop layers and walla we've saved hours as opposed to our previous methods. Need to use a specific Pantone color? Simply change the color digitally, no more acrylics, and watercolors that have to be re applied only to find out its a few shades off from the clients request.
Here are a few models we recommend you check out:
Another quality drawing tablet is the IPad Pro which we've often used when developing our mural projects on site, with our client during a brainstorm meeting or while traveling. The IPad Pro and Apple pencil fit seamlessly in a backpack or book bag and allow for a muralist to easily visualize the mural walls atmosphere and environment while sketching on site or getting a couple designs created on the plane. You'll love how the IPad can take a photo of the desired mural wall to easily directly edit, sketch and manipulate your design on the proposed mural location. The IPad pro offers a high quality drawing experience only rivaled to the Cintiq models listed above.
Here are the models we recommend:
If you're a creative person then it's no surprise that your scanned images, photo collections and basic applications on a laptop or phone can fill up your memory and slow down your computer. We've found ourselves hours into a project waiting for applications to load only to crash half way through using old or ineffective computers without the power to handle large file sizes. A one hour project can take five hours quite easily if your computer can't handle the workload you might find yourself during mural development. If you're looking to take your mural painting seriously we would recommend purchasing a high quality desktop computer that can handle the manipulation of large scale sketching, and rendering required by top name clients. This will save you time and money in the long run.
Here is a model that we recommend:
Another essential for the mural development is the software used on these drawing tablets. Our go to programs are a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Our top three software programs are Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, and Illustrator. Photoshop is essential for sketching, image manipulation and color revisions while Adobe Illustrator and indesign help us to generate stunning layouts and vector based designs for our clients. While other programs are available it's these programs that are the industry standard. You'll often find your mural clients sending along files in an Ai. format (Adobe Illustrator), or psd. format (Adobe Photoshop) with requests to manipulate or render said files for use as part of the mural design. Possessing these programs will make creation among clients seemless, effective and timely allowing you to spend less time on the computer and more time on the mural painting! Student discounts are available for those looking to harness their skills on these programs.
We hope this article helps up your mural painting development game to the next level!
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