apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Please don't use Spray Mount. The vapors are really bad for you and that stuff will gas you (and anyone you invite over) for what smells like an eternity.

Spray mount will not work... The change in temperature and humidity will cause the paper to buckle , bubble and eventually come off the wall. I have Liquid Starch works well.

Most spray mounts would leave a residue. You may want to keep an eye out for a removable wallpaper paste. Otherwise I would mount it onto a piece of plywood so that you can simply take your artwork with you when you move.

You could spray mount your print to foam core (or matte board) and then use a removeable adhesive on the substrate to mount it to the wall. That way you have some rigidity to your print even though you have a small surface area actually hanging it on the wall.

You will have to use two peices since it is hard to find either in lengths longer than 10'. Easier to pack up should you ever need to transport it though.

Spray mount is not a long-term solution. The corners will start to peel up after a while, and then when the relative humidity goes up in summer, the paper will start to bubble and not lie flat.

You could consider getting your poster pieces heat-mounted (at a framing shop) onto a few large pieces of foamcore and mounting those with 3M command strips or other removable products.

I like double stick tape, but you'll have to go with the seriously heavy-duty kind to keep up a mural that size.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the suggestions as well!


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5iveVincent is right... the smell is bad BUT... I did use it to "wallpaper" a kitchen once. I used low tack spray adhesive to put up a variety of wallpaper "squares" on one wall a rental apt kitchen. I opened every room in my house (I had a good cross breeze at the time) and wore a mask. It ended up being a good effect. When I moved out of that apartment all of the squares came off easily. I had to scrub down the wall a bit in order to remove the remnants. I think it worked really well because the wall was painted in a high gloss. I would test it someplace small if your wall is not painted in a gloss finish, it might not peel off as well. I'm not sure how well it would work to do a large mural... you'd definitely need help. While it is repositionable with sheets that big it would be very hard to shift.

There are tools made specifically for the removal of wallpaper applied with your typical wallpaper adhesives. I'd be you'd create quite more of a mess for yourself using any kind of spray mount/spray adhesive.

I imagine with the amount of spray you'd have to use it would get everywhere and take days to stop stinking, i mean you're talking about at least 2 full cans of spray. And if you were able to just peel it off later, is the residue left behind paintable? Will a repositionable spray even hold a picture printed in tiles together properly?

sounds messy.

I'd probably get a giant piece of foam-core or thin plywood, put a tiny frame around the edges by just get getting some trim wood from home depot, and hang that if I were renting.

Radiobaby makes a good point - I would think that spray mount would leave a film that would be hard to remove and difficult to paint over. At least wallpaper paste, or rice paste, or starch, will just wash off.

You could look into having your mural output onto fabric, and then hang the fabric on your wall. But for something that size it could be pricey.

if you end up putting your art onto another type of board before hanging it i'd recommend gator board over foam core. foam core is also subject to buckling but gatorboard is more dense and wont buckle. i had a friend that used rastorbator and mounted 8.5x11 black and white printouts on gatorboard then hung them all a .5" apart to make a cool mural grid.

We are in the process of doing JUST THIS THING in our apartment. We didn't use spray mount adhesive precisely because of the fumes and toxicity. We got eight different pieces of foamboard as the piece we got (an 9x13 map of the world) was in eight wallpaper-sized pieces. We used a roll-on no-VOC adhesive and it has worked like a dream. It took half the time and had no odor whatsoever.

I wouldn't use plywood or anything heavier than foamboard because it will be really difficult to hang.

Now we're just cutting down the pieces to fit them together on the wall. If someone has any idea of how to do that without having to do the whole thing with an exacto knife, I'd be eternally grateful! (And we've called up every hardware/big box store in the area, none of their lumber services have such a fine cutting machine that wouldn't leave us with destroyed foamboard.)

Good luck and I can't wait to see how it turns out!

Wait!

(I've posted this on comment on a different AT post but it should work for your situation)

I hung a poster once using very small but strong magnets. They're about the diameter of an eraser on the end of a pencil. All you do is put nails or screws into the wall every 12" or so around the edge of the poster/print, about 1" in from the outer edge of the paper. The nails/screws don't need to be large but will provide the metal for the magnet to stick to. Then you can just remove the nails when you move out and plaster the small holes that are left behind. No one will ever notice.

Also, couldn't you also try mounting the paper to a thin wood board or dowel rod at the top and bottom of the image and just hang it like that? The wood pieces would provide structure to keep it looking "flat" though you may need to weight the bottom a bit to make it hang down straight, especially if it was rolled at any point. If you went with a dowel rod, you could probably just put nails into the wall at the top to rest the rod on, or could probably get inexpensive curtain hanging hardware from Ikea that would hold the top rod, letting the rest hang down.

I would avoid using a spray adhesive if you can because that stuff is awful! Aside from the fumes, whenever I have to use it at work my fingers get so sticky I'm like Spiderman for the rest of the day.

For a richer, more unique and portable look - Why not chop up your photomural into squares or rectangles that will fit into a dozen or so identical prefab poster frames and hang them on the wall together closely spaced?

You could even spraypaint all of the frames gold for an even more opulent effect.

thanks for all the great comments! i perhaps wasn't clear that i would be printing out the mural from a desktop printer, so it would be multiple letter-sized pages that i'm looking to adhere to the wall. b/c the wall is directly perp. to my front door, i hesitate to use frames b/c of possible updraft knocking them off.

large gatorboard may work (how big does it come?!) but i wonder if it would buckle? i like the idea of preserving the smoothness of wall and having it look seamless, especially since it's SO tall (15 feet).

Don't overthink it: use tiny dabs of poster putty in each corner, one in the center. I'd print out on cardstock instead of paper, it doesn't show handling or wear as quickly.

Don't fear wallpaper paste. First, apply sizing to the wall and the wallpaper paste will later release easily.

Whatever you use (and good luck, sounds like a cool project) doe NOT use rubber cement.

Yes, apparently I am an idiot and yes, repainting a whole wall while moving out IS fun!

ohhhh no ... what happened with rubber cement?! i mean, honestly, it doesnt sound like _that_ bad of an idea. DOH!

After having a very large rasterbated picture in my old apartment, if I did it again, I'd just put it up with thumb tacks. When you cut up the pieces, you should have a little border so that you can attach one piece to the next. So really you'd only have to trim two sides. When you put it together, the thumb tacks hold the whole thing in a big piece and flat. Mounting it on a thin board or foam core sounds like it could work too (smart!), but after attaching mine to the wall and watching the printer paper warp and peal up with adhesives, next time I do this, I'm putting it up with the tacks in the corners of each page and filling in the itty bitty holes later.

after looking at the rasterbator website, i think you should just spraymount the individual pages to foamcore. do it outside. cut the edges with a sharp exacto and metal ruler. slap those up on the wall with fun-tack or something like that. The charm of those murals is in the fact that it is many pieces with seams. why give yourself the headache of making it one big hard-to-transport piece?

i've done exactly what you WANT to do and let me tell you, it's best to stick your print outs on to a sturdy board and then mount on the wall.

as for printing out your rasterbated masterpiece, i suggest you do it at kinkos. i wasted almost two ink cartridges on mine. it will be much cheaper to print at a 3rd party place instead of at home.

good luck!