08/20/2026
Presenting a proposal to a client who has never worked with an artist, to them is paint on a wall.
They soon come to realize they’re paying for everything it takes to turn a blank building into a large-scale, permanent piece of art.
We believe most mural painters agree with us.
For me and Jon, it always starts long before any paint is opened. We are having conversations about the site, the building, the neighborhood, and what the artwork actually needs to say in that space. Listening carefully to the clients vision. Then we move into the design phase—research, sketching, revisions, and constantly thinking about how something that feels right on paper is going to behave when it’s blown up to 20, 40, sometimes 60 feet tall.
Scale changes everything. A thin line in a sketch becomes a bold stripe across a building. A small portrait turns into a face that literally looks down on the street. At that size, even a small mistake in proportion doesn’t stay small—it becomes something everyone can see from blocks away. So we have to be precise from the beginning.
The wall itself is never just a blank surface either. We have worked on brick, concrete, stucco, metal, walls with cracks, moisture issues, old paint layers, windows, pipes—you name it. Each one behaves differently, and most of the time the surface needs cleaning, repair, sealing, or priming before we can even think about painting the actual artwork.
And sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re dealing with until you get there.
Some of our Mural work is out of town, so we may be pricing and planning an entire job based on photographs the client has sent us. You study those photographs, take measurements, work out the design and calculate what you think the job is going to require. Then you travel hundreds of miles, arrive at the site, stand in front of the actual wall and discover something that never showed up in the pictures.
Maybe there’s a pipe running across the wall that wasn’t visible. Maybe there are electrical boxes, vents, cracks, patched areas, a change in the surface, landscaping that prevents a lift from getting where it needs to go, or an obstruction that was just outside the frame of the photograph. Maybe the wall is in much worse condition than it appeared to be. Sometimes what looked relatively flat in a photograph turns out to have all kinds of architectural details you now have to work around.
Those things change a job.
Something that was supposed to take five days might take six or seven. You may need additional materials. You may have to rethink part of the design on the spot. The lift stays rented longer. The hotel stay gets longer. Assistants may have to stay longer. Suddenly there are expenses and labor that nobody could have anticipated from the photographs.
That’s part of the risk you take as a mural artist, especially when you’re traveling to a site you haven’t personally seen. You do your homework, you ask questions and you plan as carefully as you can, but at some point you’re making a commitment based on the information you’ve been given. Once you arrive, you have to solve whatever is actually there.
Then there’s materials, which people underestimate a lot. Exterior-grade paints and coatings are built to survive sun, rain, freezing winters, and years of exposure without fading or breaking down. A single mural can go through gallons of paint, plus primers, brushes, rollers, spray equipment, masking materials and protective finishes. It adds up fast.
And blue tape.
Miles and miles of blue tape.
People laugh when I say that, but I’m serious. Over the years, I’ve probably used what feels like miles of it. You’re laying out designs, masking lines, protecting edges, blocking off sections and trying to keep everything clean and accurate. On a huge wall, you can go through roll after roll after roll. It’s one of those little expenses nobody thinks about, but there are dozens of those “little” expenses on every mural, and together they become real money.
Getting to the wall is another cost entirely. Scaffolding, lifts and access equipment can run into thousands just to rent, not even counting delivery, fuel, insurance and sometimes permits or street closures. Before we even start painting, there’s already a serious investment just in making the wall physically reachable and safe.
The painting itself is slow, physical work. We are climbing up and down lifts, hauling materials, working in heat, wind, sometimes less-than-ideal conditions, and constantly stepping back just to make sure everything still reads correctly from the ground. A full day of work might only move a small section of the mural forward, even though it feels like a lot of effort went into it.
Weather can shut everything down without warning. Rain, extreme heat or strong wind can pause a project instantly, but the costs don’t stop. The equipment is still rented. The hotel room is still being paid for. People still have to eat. Schedules have already been made, and sometimes the next job is waiting.
That’s another part of mural pricing people don’t always see: risk.
When we give someone a price, we’re not only estimating how many gallons of paint we will use or how many hours we will physically have a brush in our hand. We are taking responsibility for getting that mural finished when there are a hundred things that can change between the original photograph and the finished wall.
There’s weather. Equipment problems. Unexpected wall conditions. Travel. Delays. Additional days on a lift. Materials you didn’t know you were going to need. Problems you couldn’t possibly see until you were standing twenty feet in the air looking directly at them.
And once you’re there, you can’t just shrug your shoulders and say, “That wasn’t in the picture.”
You figure it out.
That ability to figure it out is part of what the client is paying for.
And then there’s everything behind the scenes that nobody sees in the final photograph: travel, hotels, meals, assistants, insurance, permits, transportation, project management, communication, revisions and weeks of planning before we ever step foot on the site.
Most importantly, you’re paying for experience. We have learned over 33 years how to design for scale, choose materials that will last, work safely at height and solve problems when a wall isn’t what I expected it to be. That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from one project—it comes from years of doing it, making mistakes and figuring it out the hard way.
When a mural is finished, it doesn’t get packed up or moved. It becomes part of the building, and often part of the identity of that place. It turns into a landmark, a photo backdrop, something businesses use and something the community starts to recognize as theirs.
So when people say murals are expensive, they’re really only seeing the finished painting.
What they don’t see are the sketches, revisions, phone calls, photographs, travel, gallons of paint, lifts, hotel rooms, weather delays, unexpected problems, physical labor, years of experience—and yes, miles of blue tape—that it took to put it there.
The best murals often look effortless.
They’re not.
