Mural, part 1

Hello again!

 I had planned to start on my very first children's book several days ago- Adventures with Beebe, but after scouring my new laptop & several thumb drives for the 32 pages of saved illustrations, I discovered a very annoying fact; they now live stuck on my deceased computers hard drive down in the garage. That will teach me to not back things up! So, until such time as I get organised enough to retrieve them, I thought I would just go ahead and show you a big mural project I did a few years ago.

I love painting murals! I know this statement sounds like I'm a total pro and have done several. This isn't the case, unless you count a very feeble attempt in my youth. A friends relative had heard I liked to paint, so commissioned me (I later found out the payment was large tins of leftover house paint!) to paint an Egyptian themed mural on the wall of a backyard 'tourist attraction' featuring bits and pieces of curious treasures. My understanding and execution of perspective was extremely limited, and having been mainly a copy artist, my composition lacked skill as well. And now, here I was, presented with a request from Matt Crichton (co-creator of Ark, the Great Race, www.operationark.org, or check out the facebook page at www.facebook.com/ArkGame – a tiny bit of my mural is behind one shot!) to create a Jesus in Jeans (www.jesusinjeans.com) inspired mural for the C3 Kingscliff Kid's Church room, I immediately said 'Yes!' I wasn't backing my wealth of experience, but I was pretty convinced my enthusiasm would pay off :)

I was given several images as inspiration (from the Jesus in Jeans site) but also given a reasonable amount of creative licence. I was basing my mural on a style- not copying it exactly, which gave me the freedom to be myself. Not being adept at spray painting, this would have to be done by hand held paintbrush alone. Big effort! The brick internal wall is close to 7 metres long and in one section, over 5 metres high. I wasn't even remotely sure of how I was going to pull it off, but I just believed I could.

Thankfully, Matt painted the background a perfect shade of blue, from top to bottom. This gave me an excellent canvas to work on as I wanted to include a large portion of sky and a meandering waterway. Once I had decided on the design and kept a rough sketch as a guide, I took the plunge and on Day 1, created this image below...

This rough outline was much easier to achieve than I thought, and I was happy with the placement and perspective, and included not only the tree, but the waterway and hills.

Day 2 progressed fairly rapidly as the pictures below illustrate.

I was happy with this effort- and I had a huge amount of the basic scene laid down now. From here on, it was just a matter of filling in the background before the fun part really began!

Day 3, much more detail and filling in of the foreground, grass, tree and water.

I extended the top of the tree to give it more balance. It was now 270cm tall, and sat 87cm off the ground. Grateful for ladders and basic scaffolding! And at this point, had I mentioned how hard it is painting on bricks! Surprisingly, the lower ground was as difficult as the way up high sections.

Day 4, more shading and detail...

Now that I had reached this stage, it was time to add the main characters! And this is where more fun than painting on bricks begins.  Keep watch for part 2, coming very soon!