How to Get Your First Mural Client ✶ and what I charged the first time
Intro
When you’re an artist, there is no doubt you haven’t thought about painting a mural. Any why wouldn’t you? They look epic, you get your work on display to hundreds if not thousands of people who would have never seen your work otherwise. You become part of the local lore of sorts.
So now you’re thinking, “damn this would be so cool, i want to do that. but how?”
Hi! I can help!
How I got interested in murals
I start thinking about painting a mural in July 2019 and that October I got to paint my first ever mural!
I had been bingeing painting processes from the lettering greats like Lauren Hom, Steffi Lynn, Pandr Designs and Jennet Liaw. I was obsessively watching their videos to see how they painted in layers, what brushes, how big of ladder was used. I analysed the heck out of those process videos!
For context, I am not a traditional artist. My background is in graphic design and I was primarily a digital artist (except for my block printed stuff of course), so actually picking up a brush was sort of a foreign concept to me.
After immersing myself into this world of mural painting I bought an online course from Elloise Mae, and her course was good! Straight forward and short. I was able to complete it in a day! It solidified the guess work i had been doing so it made me confident pitching myself to potential clients.
How I got my first two clients
My first two clients were a Crossfit gym and a Yoga studio based in Perth. Both of these businesses were amazing clients and so easy to communicate with.
How i got in contact with them was through a facebook group! In my home city there is a facebook group dedicated to women in business, so, I did a simple call out asking if anyone was trusting of this total novice!
I attached some images of my style and said that I would do it for cheap.
It was actually so ridiculously cheap, but that’s how I got my foot in the door.
How you can get your first mural
If you have a local business group online, you should definitely do a call out there!
Another way to get your first mural is by painting electrical boxes. A lot of major cities have art programs to beautify urban areas in an effort to reduce graffiti. My good friend, Kajal, painted one through the city council in Melbourne which was aimed at young artists under 25. She got to paint a box and even got paired with an experienced artist to help guide her through the process!
If you have friends or family that have spare walls, you can approach them too! But tell them you’ll do it in exchange for a great meal. Or if you’re lucky enough you have your own home to paint, why not do one for your living room?
Are you part of any community groups like a church, sports team, local council? Find out if there could be an opportunity to paint a materials cost mural for them.
And if all else fails, you can practise on a really big canvas.
Pricing your first mural
This is something that I cannot stress enough. But you MUST price your work, even if it’s your first one and you’re doing it for basically free.
You need to ask for the material costs at least, so that would include your paint, brushes, drop cloth, buckets, chalk, pencils, projector rental or paper transfers. All that jazz. That is the minimum amount you need to ask for.
Why is this important? Because if you are legitimately wanting to add this service to your business. You need to make it feel like you are already offering this as a premium service. What this also does is reinforce to your client, that this is a big discount, you are doing each other a favour, you are helping each other’s businesses.
If you are lucky, the client might love your work so much and ask for another mural, or recommend you to another business. You don’t want them telling other businesses you did theirs for free. You want them to tell others that you did their for a discount, or for a limited time offering.
Ok, so back to the point.
Price your mural with you materials cost at a minimum! I just looked at Bunnings and calculated all the items I would need and charged it to the client and rounded it up to the nearest 100.
and bam! my first mural was $200 for 11 hours of painting, few more hours of design time.
Reflecting
I was SO proud of this mural. It was very challenging with the deep mortar bricks and the design was 3d lettering which was even harder to wrap my head around as a first time muralist. I knew that i had to paint the ‘bottom’ colours first, but as a digital artist I couldn’t think like that, it’s just not natural to me
I had booked my second client through the facebook group as well, but after finishing this i told them it would be $300 for their mural. She was totally on board with this, even though I was scared to tell her the price.
This is the second mural. Abstract and freehand! This took 16 hours to paint over 3 days.
Now I know $200, $300 is soooooo cheap and you’re going to have other artists tell you “You’re ruining the industryyyyy” but think of it like this. You are totally new to this and no idea what to do. Your client also new to this and probably also doesn’t know what to do. Pretend you’re a vacuum from kmart, it looks alright, and it’s really cheap. So you’re willing to give it a go because of the price. If it totally sucks, no harm done it was a cheap purchase, but if it’s amazing? You’re going to be singing it’s praises until the cows come home.
And that’s hopefully going to be you. A surprisingly good vacuum from kmart.
End
So yeah! That’s how i got my first clients and how I priced my first two murals.
If you are planning on doing the same, make sure you get heapsssssss of content. Photos, videos the works! Do the trending tiktok, do your headshots, do process videos. Take your time with these as the first murals will set your portfolio up to pitch to full paying clients!
I hope you found this helpful and if you have any questions leave them below.
I have another video coming soon about how i got my first full paying client! So subscribe if that’s something you think you’ll benefit from.
Thanks for watching! Till the next video! Bye!
