How to Paint an Engineering Mural (Speedrun)
Author: Edmund Co, VP Communications 2025-26
Greetings,
We have no idea how you might’ve wandered on this page. Maybe you’re thinking about painting your own mural to showcase an important aspect in the engineering community. Maybe you’ve been wanting to add a splash of colour to the engineering building of doom and despair. Maybe you just wanna read up on the lore.
Look no further. Murals are one of the best ways to showcase culture and art. It has been one of my greatest achievements throughout my undergrad engineering journey at Western Engineering. From the moment we started drawing sketches on the wall, we finished a mural in 3 weeks! Here is how we did it.
Disclaimer: This guide is dedicated to Western Engineering. If you are from another school, you need to ask your respective faculty about the process.
Preliminaries
Rationale
Before you even pick up your Apple Pencil and doodle some designs on Goodnotes, you need a reason to paint. You can’t just paint for the sake of enjoyment or self-fullfilment; the mural needs a reason to exist. Facilities Management and Faculty is pretty strict and will not allow any average joe to paint on the walls of SEB.
For example, our reason was to showcase boilersuit culture as there has been no representation since it’s establishments in 2018. For inspiration, your mural can showcase more old Western Engineering traditions or even newer ones, such as the Eng V Ivey Rivalry Series (patent pending).
Timing
Murals don’t come up in one day; they are a multi-month project that requires patience and lots planning. Usually you want to paint over the summer to reduce as much disruption as possible. You should keep in mind that Western runs the Outreach program over the summer, so you can expect little children be awed and inspired of your work. However, if your mural is inside a room (i.e. The UES Lounge), it is a lot easier to control foot traffic and you should have no problem painting over the semester. Make sure you take the appropriate time for planning before you realize it’s too late to begin:
If you want to paint over the summer, be sure to start planning way ahead in March
If you want to paint over the semester, be sure to start planning over the summer or the previous semester
Team
You can’t paint a mural alone, no matter how hard you try, you will succumb to exhaustion and burnout. Engineering is a Jeam Sport, and that rule applies to painting murals. You will need to step up and act as a leader. Gather a team full of different personalities and talents. Our team composed of:
Two insane yet committed students, acting as mural leads
Two talented artists who knows a thing or two about painting
Three very enthusiastic students, just there for the vibes
It is also very crucial that someone on your team has a car (those Home Depot trips aren’t always easy). You don’t need to form your entire team at the very beginning. Maybe recruit a friend or two who you know would be super down to help you out. Then you can start finding more volunteers after you have a better idea of what you want to paint.
By then, you can start discussing with your small team about preliminary sketches, time availability, colour choices, design elements, etc. Don’t go too crazy just yet because we still need…
The Wall
A painter needs to see what canvas they are working with before they begin. Go around the building and try to find some walls that you feel needs a splash of personality. Have a few walls in mind for back-up. You can ask a friend you recruited in the previous point to help you mark out the dimensions. I would exclusively stick to SEB walls (excluding the SEB annex/extension) because it will be difficult to get permission to paint over the more modern ACEB and CMLP.
Some things I would keep in mind when choosing a wall is how visible it is and how much foot traffic I can expect.
Sketching
Great, you have a solid reason, a solid plan, a solid team, and a solid wall. Maybe you already have some ideas and sketches down too. However, you need to make sure that your design is to scale with the wall’s dimensions. To do this, I would recommend first determining a grid size. It would be a lot easier to transfer your design from paper onto the wall using a grid system.
The idea is that you first draw your mural design over a grid, then you draw a huge grid on the wall so you can easily cross-reference points. For example, perhaps a 1x1cm square on your sketch represents a 10x10in square on the wall.
Even though you could be a Goodnotes wizard, I highly recommend using an actual app made for drawing and sketching. Layering tools would extremely benefit this process.
Finalized Design
Before you proudly present your design to faculty, you need to come up with a sketch that looks like a finished product. It is important to consult with your team in terms of deciding on what shapes, colour, and elements to use. The important part about having a diverse team is that you can collect different opinions on how to best cater to the general student population and faculty. Beware that this process can take months. Our team constantly went back-and-forth with finalizing a colour scheme until we finally landed on dark navy skies with rolling orange hills.
The Proposal
Hold your horses. Before you start heading to Home Depot to buy gallons of paint, you need to write a formal proposal document and get it approved. And your proposal shouldn’t just be a jpeg of your design; you need to consider rationale for the mural (which I hope you already have), the budget, and who is responsible for oversight and the work itself. This proposal needs to get approved by the dean and acting director (in our case, Dean Kenneth Coley and Stephanie Tigert). Any changes you make to the design after getting approved will have to be brought to their attention, so make sure your design is super finalized or you will be playing a long waiting game.
The first time we went through this process was daunting. Stephanie was very helpful and patient in guiding us and getting the design approved with the dean. Shoutout to Stephanie, the goat.
Budget
We are hoping that you are not painting a mural out of your own pocket because it can cost up to $1000 for the entire process. Make sure you account for the absolutely everything, from preparing the wall to paints and materials. For example, we had to pay for the carpentry work required to take down the bullentin boards and patch up any holes left from drilling in the wall. We barely made it under $1000, so depending on the size of your wall, you might want to budget for more. Don’t forget the celebratory pizza party.
I can expect a lot of murals to be funded by the UES. Be sure to reach out to our VP Finance for more details.
Painting
The walls in SEB aren’t the best. A lot of them are chipped and cracked and have weird stains. You would need to submit a work order to Facilities Management (in our case, Mike Gaylard) to paint your approved wall over with a nice, fresh coat of paint. They might also help you patch up any weird holes or cracks. This might take a few days to go follow through, so remember to get the work order in relatively early.
After the paint has dried, you can start outlining your design on the wall. If you have listened to us before, first outline the grid on the wall (i.e. 10x10 in for us), and then you can easily and precisely transfer your design over by using the grid as reference points. You can use a projector for more abstract elements, such as people.
For clean paint application, you can also apply painter’s tape here. For more intricate taping, be careful using an X-acto knife as you can easily slice into the wall (we found out that the wall we chose already had 3 layers of paint applied to it). After your outline and taping has been completed, the fun part of painting begins.
Lay down a tarp over your work area so you don’t make a mess on the floors. The only paint we were allowed to use was any latex-based paint. We thought we had to order some special paint through faculty which would have taken forever, but fortunately we were able to simply take a trip to Home Depot and get all the resources we need. Figuring out what colours we needed was as easy as browsing through the thousands of colours Home Depot offered and selecting the ones that matched closely with the design. However, Figuring out quantities was a problem. We found ourselves making multiple trips to Home Depot because we kept running out of paint. For large areas (i.e. dark navy skies), usually getting a quart or two of paint was enough. Never ever ask for the small sample sizes because you will almost always end up asking for more.
You may find that you have to mix paints. I would recommend noting down the ratio of paints used so you can easily make more in the future.
Patience and Pain
Probably the last words you’d want to hear after stepping up to paint a mural. Don’t worry, it doesn’t always have to be this way.
Painting a mural in 3 weeks is not an easy task. We could have easily spread our work over weeks and months. However, our design was only approved in late July and we needed to finish it before the Sophs needed to come in for their training and shenanigans during mid-August. Painting a mural required the dedication of two sleepless engineers who spent up to 12+ hours a day breathing the same SEB air and huffing (safe and odourless) latex paint.
Celebrating Your Work
Have a nice last get-together with the team! Enjoy freezies and some pizza to celebrate all the hard work everyone has dumped to make a beautiful mural! We thought this was the end, but there is always more work to be done.
At last, on August 11th at 5:19am, the mural was completed and stands proudly beside the UES lounge.
Special thanks to Emely Estevez to all her hard work and sleepless nights. And big thanks to Madison Sylvester and Amrithaa Logeswaran for all their efforts aiding with the design. Shoutout to Emily Pak, Clara Levy, Dhairya Jain, and all the volunteers for their help with painting the mural.