“Take it off... Take it all off....” Whether you’re a mural installer (or a novice exotic dancer), those words can instill fear in your heart. Every good mural installer knows that wall murals don’t come off—at least not very easily. Not without taking big chunks of wall off with them. But times have changed. Today there are a number of new products on the market to solve this age-old graphics dilemma.

A key word with some of these new products is fabric. Fabric as a substrate provides extra tensile strength and rigidity that the original vinyl wall murals lacked.  Vinyl is easier to stretch, tear, crease and wrinkle than fabric. Fabric also tends not to curl, buckle, crack or shrink over time, unlike vinyl, which is less stable. Fabric is thicker than vinyl as well, helping to cover up imperfections in the wall surface. Fabric also has wonderful textures that add a rich, luxurious, dimensional feel to the graphics. Fabric, with its increased durability, is often easier to install and remove.

Fabric Murals and Removable Adhesives

Dreamscape was a pioneer in the field of fabric murals, and it has a large variety of textural options. The original ones had to be installed with wallpaper paste, and this is still a popular option; but peel and stick adhesive backings are rapidly taking over the market. Other players have come to the table as well.

Photo Tex has dramatically changed the landscape with its patented removable adhesives. Most adhesives either strengthen or weaken over time, meaning that they either tend to be difficult to remove, or they may fall off by themselves at an inopportune moment. The Photo Tex adhesive is fully cured on delivery. The mural can be uninstalled in a day, or in a decade, it won’t make any difference. And not only is it removable, it is also repositionable. As long as the adhesive stays clean, it can be repositioned countless times.

Now here’s a biggie—wall murals have always had a problem sticking to some paint finishes, like flat latex. And as we know, most walls are painted with flat latex paint. This has long been the biggest thorn in the mural installer’s side, but according to the manufacturer, Photo Tex adhesives will stick to any paint—even flat latex or the new non-VOC paints A high-tack version is also available for walls with a bit of texture. And did I mention green? The company says that Photo Tex is environmentally friendly and biodegradable.

LexJet now offers a similar fabric-based product called Print-N-Stick that is aimed at photographic inkjet mural printing applications. The printable fabric is LexJet’s popular Water-Resistant Satin Cloth backed with a repositionable, removable adhesive. It removes cleanly and easily with no adhesive residue. The fabric provides high ink saturation and a 110 degree white point. And like Photo Tex it will not rip, wrinkle or stretch in production, making it easy to cut into any shape. Print-N-Stick Fabric is compatible with aqueous and latex inkjet printers.

Removable Murals - Your Way

But let’s say you’re a busy shop going flat out full-time and a client asks for a removable wall mural. What to do, but call a wholesale printer that specializes in just such a service.

Hopkins, Minnesota-based Murals Your Way is a wholesale printing operation specializing in custom murals. They offer a high-end removable wallpaper product called SmartStick that can be moved and reused hundreds of times without losing adhering qualities. This repositionable wallpaper requires no paste and no glue. Just peel the backing and adhere your custom wallpaper to nearly any surface.

They offer a wide variety of stock materials to choose from (including fabric) and they understand what’s involved in prepress and know all of the production tricks. The mural arrives pre-trimmed and ready to hang. It’s a no-stress way to increase a print shop’s client offerings. Murals Your Way claims to be the world's largest custom wall mural manufacturer. Customers can choose from more than 750,000 wall mural images, or they can use their own art.

Do it Yourself Tips

For shops that want to get into the wall mural business themselves, there are some tips and tricks. Let’s start with the prepress. Clients rarely understand the resolution requirements of a large mural. Dealing with images that don’t have enough resolution to print at the appropriate size can be bothersome, but the alternative is sometimes losing the job, so it’s usually worth the extra effort.

If the image has had some compression applied, like jpeg, the effects won’t be as dramatic as with uncompressed images, but its still worth the work. Start with increasing the resolution using Photoshop’s Image Size command. Set it to Bicubic Smoother for best results. Don’t try to enlarge too much in one step. Lots of little enlargements are generally better than one big one.

The Unsharp Mask filter also can work wonders. Try using it on only one color channel in order to mitigate some of the little side effects than can occur. The other three color channels (assuming that the image is in CMYK mode) will provide camouflage. Every image is different, but the cyan layer often gives good results and can handle a lot of filter tweaking. The black channel has more dramatic results, but can be great if used carefully. Prepress isn’t over until the contrast and color are corrected as well.

When printing large tiled panels an effect sometimes occurs that is not evident in untiled images. The color may appear to be slightly different from the left to right sides of the image. This becomes especially obvious when the panels are butted up to each other in the completed mural. The left side of one tile is next to the right side of the next tile and this tiny color shift suddenly becomes apparent. To fix this problem, the image should be flipped alternately during printing. So one panel prints top first, the next tile prints bottom first and so on. That way the right side of the print is always adjoining the right side of the other print and the left side is always with the left side.

Installation

As mentioned earlier, mural installation is a lot easier with this type of “peel & stick” material. Don’t trim the tops and bottoms before installation, walls and ceilings are seldom as straight as they look, and that extra print will be very useful. Like vinyl murals, each panel should have a small overlap with the neighboring panel. Unlike vinyl murals, which shrink over time and need the overlap for safety, most fabric murals are stable. The extra thickness of the fabric also makes the overlaps look ugly. But they are still necessary for installation- it would be too difficult to get those seams precise enough without them. After installation, a large straightedge is placed over the seam and it is double-cut, that is, one cut is made down the middle of the overlap going through both fabric layers. The two excess pieces are then discarded.

Job is done, quick and easy. And the best part is that the installer doesn’t have to sweat about becoming the un-installer.