“It’s good, profitable business,” says Bill Barley, owner of Bill Barley & Associates, Lexington, S.C. That “good, profitable business” to which Barley refers is custom wall murals printed on a variety of materials for home and office décor.
In the project pictured here, Barley chose to print this original mural by David Hedges to LexJet TOUGHcoat 3R DuPont Tyvek. Barley discussed using an adhesive-backed product, like Photo Tex Repositionable Fabric, with the client, but the client was more comfortable using professional wallpaper hangers to apply the Tyvek.
“The job went really well. The LexJet Tyvek material is dimensionally stable. When you wet the back of it and put the paste on it, it doesn’t swell like a lot of wallpaper products do. The wallpaper professionals told me that they’ve had problems with similar murals on conventional wallpaper material swelling, which makes it very difficult to match up the panels,” says Barley.
The artwork was commissioned specifically for this project. Barley planned for Hedges to paint the initial artwork at one-third the size of the final mural. Barley digitized it and Hedges finished the details using Adobe Illustrator.
The images were brought up to full size with Genuine Fractals and then cropped in Photoshop. “I did the cuts full size in Photoshop so I could get pixel-to-pixel matching with no overlap on the final panels,” says Barley.
The panels – four 34″ x 6′ vertical panels for the bar mural, one 3′ x 5′ panel for the car/theater image and three 36″ x 10′ panels that would comprise the top border – were printed through the ImagePrint RIP on Barley’s Epson Stylus Pro 9880.
“As far as the material printed, it was excellent. The material holds color well with good color matching. I printed out a sample and checked the color balance on it and then printed the job. I didn’t have to re-print anything,” says Barley. “It’s a permanent installation in an upscale home, which is one of the reasons they wanted to hang it like wallpaper. There will be cabinetry and a marble counter built around it to finish it off.”
