It was rainy this a.m. but I decided it was just bluffing so I went down the hill to paint. The sky has been waking me up in the middle of the night, so I just HAD to start on it today!
This stretch is the first length of the scaffolding. I must have climbed up and down about 20 – 30 times today (been eating bananas hoping the monkey effect will kick in!). It is a bugger to move – Curtis from a couple of doors down helped me out quite a bit today. And there was that one time when the wheel went between the curb and the board – it caused an emergency phone call to Rising Sun Construction. William came with a shovel and leveled out the rest of the boards, minus the end which will have to be dealt with tomorrow. I bet you are wondering what that little blur is on the bottom left corner. It is the signatures of those who helped with the projection:
I worked all a.m. and still didn’t cover half the sky. This was with a giant brush, bought this morning just for the sky. “Giant” is a relative term – nothing is “giant” compared with this wall! Here are the final photos for the day:
The blue doesn’t quite match real sky, although it does match the model painting. It may get adjusted on the second coat.
See how the curbing drops at the front end? Curtis and I moved the scaffolding as far forward as possible, but I couldn’t reach the top even on my tip-toes and leaning out (don’t tell my mom I did this!) The climbing is getting easier, but I’m thinking a lift or cherry-picker might be necessary to get the sky to blend all the way across. It is a little tough to match when it takes so long to move the scaffolding from patch to patch. More will be revealed. And it only rained a little – no big deal!
Mural, Day Two
Notice the railings on the top level! I can now begin on the sky without wondering if I will go splat! on the ground or get hung up between the scaffolding and the wall. THANK YOU to Rising Sun Construction!! Michael leveled boards along the wall in the planting bed (actually it seems to be more of a cat box than a planting bed. . .) so that the scaffolding can be rolled along as I work the sky. THANKS, Dear Husband! 
He also brought my little red wagon so that I can haul my supplies into The Downtown Gallery for storage at the end of each day. THANK YOU Cousin Chris! 
Here is the day’s progress.
Doesn’t look like a whole lot yet, but it is way way way larger than any canvas I have ever painted. (I’m talking about just this scene being larger, not even thinking of the entire wall because it might cause a tic under my left eye to think about the whole thing.) Next: draw the missing info on the 9 empty feet on the left, begin the sky, and then decide if I finalize the old store/post office now or leave it for another time! A couple of more thanks: THANKS to Trudy S for the coffee and cookie! THANKS to Curtis and to Larry and Dora for the facilities! THANKS to Sharon for stopping by with her mom!
Inquiring minds. . .
. . . like to know! Cousin Maggie asked me some great questions about mural painting and indicated that others probably are wondering the same things. So, here we go on a mural tutorial!
- PAINT: Acrylic paint by a company called Nova Color is the paint preferred, no, REQUIRED by the Exeter Mural Team. It is highly pigmented so that it resists fading, and I have chosen the primary colors with the highest lightfast ratings for my mural. In addition to the primaries, I chose Burnt Umber for use on the sepia toned “postcards”.
- BRUSHES: Nadi Spencer is very very good at murals and she does the entire thing with a very small cheap brush. Steven Ball is very very good at murals and he said, “Brushes don’t matter”. Say what?? So far I have used a 1-1/2″ brush from the hardware store and a smallish stiff round brush that I might have had since college for most of my murals (all three of them!) I use a few others too, and have to keep reminding myself to choose the largest ones possible in order to keep up the pace.
- PERSPECTIVE: Because the shapes are projected and traced, the sizes are correct. I paint up close for awhile, then I back up and see if it is right. It usually needs a little tweaking, but not much.
- WEATHERING: The paints are lightfast but murals do fade, depending on the exposure. Northern ones last the longest, Southern ones fade the fastest. Bummer, mine faces south. When I was on the Mural Team, our consultant advised against coating the murals for several reasons. Now I think there are new materials available, but this is the Mural Team’s part, not mine. Because the project started in 1996, they have rehired artists to refresh their faded murals.
- HELP: I can get help for the first layers that just need to be covered in paint. (Someone suggested putting numbers in the spaces like a paint-by-number!) The parts that require detail and my style can only be done by me, as per my contract.
- SCAFFOLDING: It is heavy, but once I get used to how it works, I can probably move it. And there are very nice strong men working in the building who helped me on Wednesday.
Giant Project, Day One
The scaffolding is really really high and can’t get moved closer to the wall yet, and we have to figure out how to fill the blank 9 feet on the left end.
See what I mean? So when you can’t do a thing the way you had planned, you make a new plan! (Well, I do, anyway!) So today I practiced moving the scaffolding, climbed up and down a few times (but not to the top – there’s nothing to hold onto up there so I have to ease into this!), and tinkered around with some ideas for that space. Then I decided to do a little painting to get the feel of the plastered surface. 
This is really big in real life, but not so big compared to the wall. People stopped by the whole time to say hi, offer the use of their adjacent businesses for breaks or storing stuff, offer encouragement and ask questions. Sometimes they would say “That is the biggest mural yet!” I’d have to tell them not to say that outloud or I might get scared. Right now I am just amped up!! See how small today’s work is in comparison with the wall??
It was really hot working there today! Really really hot! Now that’s incentive to get ‘er dun before summer comes!
Flexible schedule
Guess what?? We projected the mural tonight and it is ready to paint!!! Had to, because it is going to rain on Thursday and Friday. Look! There were some tall young men who were very very helpful – Jarson, Joshua (I think that was Mr. Blue Shirt’s name!) and Jared, who is one of my drawing students. That is Mickey securing the ladder with his foot.
Betsy can draw well – she has been helping me on this project from Day One and got the entire event organized at the last moment today! 
These guys look like clowns, but Bill is the president of the Mural Team who changed his schedule to get ready this evening on a moments notice, and Larry? he pushed the scaffolding along real well!
These are the official Mineral King Consultants who made sure everything looked accurate. Good thing they were here and noticed that everything was getting smaller and lower instead of larger and higher! (that projection method has some weak points.) 
The maquette (model painting) was a great help to correct for projector distortion and verifying accuracy. 
And this is the final panel of the 10 required to cover the entire wall. Unfortunately, there is about 5 feet of wall remaining on the left side, so tomorrow I will be looking through photographs to decide how to fill that space! All that planning and still a bit of a gap – flexible schedule, flexible design!
Projection
First published in January 2009
Remember overhead projectors? That is the device we hope to use to project the image on the wall. I spent 4-1/2 hours tracing the model painting of the mural onto a roll of tissue paper (the kind called “flimsy” by architects). Today I found back-up bulbs for the projector, bought a couple of boxes of magic markers, and had my tracing converted to a series of 10 transparencies. 
The projection takes place after dark with lots of people manning Magic Markers. The process ensures that the mural will match the model painting that has been approved. The model painting is called a “maquette”, which actually means a 3 dimensional model, but we don’t have an adequate word for a 2 dimensional model. The Mural Team requires an accurate to-scale painting before giving the go-ahead to an artist, and the artist is supposed to follow that maquette to a tee!
On my previous murals, I simply drew a small to-scale sketch and then marked off the centers of the painting surface and began drawing with my paintbrush. I thought 80″ x 80″ was huge.
Next, the Seatrain (20′ x 8′) was stunningly massive.
Finally I began the one on 6 4’x8′ panels and could hardly grasp the grandeur of it all. (Silly girl, Trix are for kids!) That one on panels was difficult because the design process hadn’t been fully solved before attempting the panels.
The Mural Team of Exeter has much experience (2 dozen or so murals since 1996) and knows that the design process has to be completed and adhered to in order to have any sort of control over their outdoor gallery. (I fully agree with this because I was the President of the Mural Team when we put these rules into place.)
The Wall
First published in January 2009
Look at this!!! Holy Guacamole!
Giant Project Revealed
First published in January 2009
- What? the next mural in Exeter
- Where? the 100 north block of E street, on the west side, facing south . Yes, that is correct – it overlooks the parking lot of the Exeter Sun.
- When? We are hoping to project the image on the wall on the evenings of Thursday and Friday, February 5 and 6
- Biggest what: (no surprise here) – Mineral King, of course! 😎
- Size: The wall is 105′ x 15″; the mural will be 103′ x 12′ *
- Who? me! I get to paint it after planning for months and months and months. . .
Print this out, cut out the pictures, tape them together in this order, imagine the longest sepia part scooted to the left, and there is the next mural!!
- Update: The wall turned out to be 110′ long, and the mural ran the entire length
Breakthrough!
First published in January 2009
This little gem is a sneak peak at the Giant Project, known hereon as GP. Why am I teasing you with this? Because I have had a victory and want to share it! I have been fighting my paint and brushes, trying like crazy to get them to do what I want. I struggle along, wondering if I will ever learn to paint properly, wondering why I can’t get anything to do what I request, wondering why no matter how many hours spent it still looks like a dog’s breakfast.
On Sunday a.m. a bottle of linseed oil appeared on my front porch with a note from my 6th grade teacher. (He signed it “Tom S.” and I thought it was from someone I know here in town because I always think of my 6th grade teacher’s first name as “Mr.”, not “Tom”, for goodness sake!)
Like the good girl that I try to be, I wrote him a thank you note and wondered if I would ever have a use for linseed oil in painting because my earlier attempts at using it have been crap less than satisfactory. It left random shiny spots on the painting which I tried to ignore, and then a well meaning friend said, “I like this painting but it has shiny spots on it”.
Then I learned about some special recipe from the teacher at the junior college where I soldiered through half a semester of a painting class 2 years ago. (I sort of knew he and I weren’t a good teacher-student match when he said to me “The trouble is, you don’t know how to draw!” Okay, thanks for that helpful tidbit Mister, but I am about to have an opening of a solo show of my drawings so your opinion of my abilities is crap less than satisfactory.) Anyway, this special recipe also made random shiny spots and was weird to use, sort of sticky and it made the color too weak, and I could see no point to using it. Maybe if I had stayed the entire semester I would have learned how to solve this problem, but it seemed that staying home to paint was a better use of my time than driving 80 minutes round trip for each class that was mostly just easel time with bad light and bad rap “music”.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, I bravely went out to the easel, determined to master this problem of misbehaving paint and WHAM! into my brain came the idea of linseed oil from Mr. S. (the good teacher who taught me how to draw but denies it saying I already knew. . . go figure! I knew how to draw in 6th grade but somehow forgot through my career of drawing?)
Knowing things on the easel couldn’t possibly get any worse, I tried the linseed oil mixed with the paint and it was MAGICAL! It was fabulous! All I can say is THANK YOU GOD for sending Mr. S by with that linseed oil, even before I knew it was needed so desperately!