From Bob Formisano,
Your Guide to Home Repair.
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Large Area Repair:
Although outside the scope of this tutorial, I thought I'd mention how a larger area is repaired. If you're repairing a large area or entire wall, then you'll probably have to use a hopper spray gun and air compressor.

You can typically rent this equipment from a rental store. You put a thinned mixture of drywall joint compound (e.g., 30 pounds of compound to 5 pints of water) with consistency like runny batter into the hopper, run the gun half open through a small nozzle at about 25-30 psi and you should be close to the right size "splats" for an orange peel wall texture.

Any number of textures can be applied by varying these four things:

Size of the gun orifice and orifice opening

Trigger Setting

Air pressure

Consistency of joint compound mix