How long does a graffiti mural take to paint?
Short answer: most hand-painted graffiti murals are finished in one to two days on-site. Small feature walls can be done in an afternoon. Big exterior facades take a working week. The mock-up and concept phase happens separately, usually three to seven days before paint day.
By size, roughly
These are real timelines from real walls, not aspirational ones.
- Small feature wall (under 5 m²): 4 to 6 hours, one artist, one visit. Living room walls, kid's rooms, café counter-back panels.
- Medium interior (5 to 15 m²): 1 to 2 days. Restaurant feature walls, retail backdrops, café full-height walls.
- Large interior (15 to 40 m²): 2 to 4 days. Full-room treatments, bar interiors, hotel lobbies.
- Exterior facade (any size): 3 to 5+ days. Add a day for prep, a day for sealants, weather contingency.
- Gable wall / building-side (50 m²+): a week or more, scaffold or cherry-picker time included.
What slows things down
The wall almost never takes longer than expected. The stuff around the wall does.
- Surface prep: a clean, smooth wall paints fast. A flaking exterior brick or rising-damp wall needs a day of prep before paint can even start.
- Weather: exterior paint needs dry surfaces and temperatures above about 5°C. A wet week in London can push a one-day job to three.
- Height and access: if we need a cherry-picker or tower scaffold, half of day one is hire and rigging.
- Design complexity: photo-realism, fine character work, and dense detail take longer than chunky bubble letters and bold colour fields.
- Mid-paint changes: changing the design after the wall is half-painted is the single biggest timeline killer. This is why mock-ups exist.
The mural takes a day. Everything else takes weeks.
What speeds things up
- A clear brief. See our briefing template, it cuts a week off the front end.
- A prepped wall. If you can have the wall cleaned and primed before we arrive, paint day starts at 8am instead of noon.
- Daylight. We can paint into the evening with site lights, but cleaner work happens in natural light.
- Decisive sign-off. Two rounds of mock-up revisions is normal. Five rounds is not.
The mock-up phase (separate)
Before any paint touches the wall, we sketch a concept and overlay it onto a photo of your space. That phase takes:
- Day 1 to 2: we read the brief, do a site visit if it's local, sketch concepts.
- Day 3 to 5: first mock-up to you, refined to your feedback.
- Day 5 to 7: sign-off, paint day scheduled.
Total brief-to-finished-wall: usually three to four weeks, end to end. We can compress to under two weeks for activations and pop-ups.
Need a wall painted by a date?
Tell us the wall, the size, and the deadline. We'll come back inside 24 hours with whether it's doable.
WhatsApp us the deadline →A typical paint day
Here's what a one-day interior mural looks like, hour by hour.
- 8.00am: arrive, lay drop sheets, mask edges, test paint on an off-cut.
- 9.00am: chalk out the design at scale, double-check proportions against the mock-up.
- 10.00am to 1.00pm: base layers, big colour blocks, the heavy lifting.
- 1.00pm: short break (yes, even on a deadline).
- 1.30pm to 5.30pm: outlines, detail, highlights, drips, the bits that make it look painted-by-a-human.
- 5.30pm to 6.30pm: tighten anything that needs it, photograph, clean up.
- 6.30pm: wall is yours.
Most clients are surprised by how fast a wall comes together once paint actually starts hitting it. The slow bit is everything before, not the painting itself.