Painting a Seven Samurai wall decoration

At the end of this tutorial, you will get the following result:

Starting situation

An empty boring wall in the kitchen. It desperately needed something to make it look cool.

The tools of the trade

You'll be painting a one color black and white picture, for that you will use two brushes: one 2mm, and one 12mm, and this little roll to paint larger black areas.

Add about 10% water to the color to get it a bit thinner for easier painting.

Your secret weapon: a projector! It will project exactly what you will have to paint.

Get a cool picture

One of the the most badass picture ever: a still from the movie Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. The goal is to get this picture onto the wall. Best of all, you won't need to be able to draw!

Simplified Black & White Art

Loadthe picture into Inkscape (it's free and open source). Convert it into a black and white vector graphic with

Path > Trace Bitmap > Brightness cutoff.

Play a bit with the parameters to get a nice result.

Export this graphic as a bitmap, in the native resolution of the projector so no further scaling is necessary (1280x720 in this case).

And here's the result:

Projecting the image on the wall

Project the picture with any image viewing app that has fullscreen. Take great care that the projector is focused and stable so that it does not move for the next hours.

Set to negative

A negative image makes it easier for painting: just paint everything that's bright (except the mouse pointer to the far left...).

Its safer to use the negative, because otherwise when painting black you might paint accidental shadows, like the watering can to the bottom left. this can't happen when using the negative.

Start Drawing

Start with a small face to see if the end result would look good enough. First paint all the borders with the 2mm brush, then fill out the rest with the 12mm brush, and use the roll on the large parts.

Finished Painting