how to make your own anime mural wall

Now that the anime mural wall for the kid’s bathroom is finished, my husband Peter did a little write up on his process of redoing the kids bathroom with anime images pasted to the wall, hopefully it all makes sense.

Anime Wall Mural

Before I start I must stress that this is for personal consumption only. Because you will be making copies of existing work and sizing them up as decoration its super important that this is for you and your family to enjoy, not for re-selling / publication.

1. That said, find an anime story or novel that has good contrast black and white content and think about how it might work when sliced and diced into sections. (The book our images are taken from is “Kekkaishi” by Yellow Tanabe, ISBN#978-1-4215-4029-0.)
 
2. Mark pages you like best, and then scan the images into Adobe Photoshop. We did ours in grayscale, because all of this in color might have been a little crazy for our space, but maybe not for yours (plus black and white is cheaper to print than color). You will need to play with the contrast in Photoshop and either “size-up” the dimensions in that program, or in Adobe Illustrator which is what I did.
3. Next, make a pdf of the jpeg and e-mail or thumb-drive it to an Officemax, Staples, whoever has a commercial “plotter” printer. This is the type of printer that you saw in Exit through The Gift Shop…. and what you will need in order to print larger sheets. It prints black and white only and grays tend to drop out so better for the image to be high contrast. It is very reasonable to print on the plotter (we printed 24×36 panels).


 
4. Once you have your prints, slice them up so they make some random sense for your wall section. For adhesion we used plain old wallpaper sizing and a roller. We brushed the backs of the plotter prints and stuck them down on the wall. This works really well and shouldn’t mess with the image.
 
5. Last step is to protect with a couple coats of poly acrylic and you are done.

The kids are so excited about the look of it, and it only took an afternoon.