The Making of a Mural
Murals
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This year started with a BIG Challenge for Michael and me. We are part of a big church in Huddersfield called Huddersfield Christian Fellowship Which has just re-located to new purpose built multi-million pound building named Cathedral House. Among other things the church houses a large bookshop, coffee shop and a children's play gym called Fizzy Lizard. Just before Christmas our pastor, Colin Cooper, commissioned us to paint a mural for the play gym. As the building was still in construction then we only had a rough idea of what sort of size we were dealing with but Jo Lewis who runs the gym intimated that the wall was big. Well we've done lots of children's rooms so we felt confident to take on the job and went about creating a design for the wall, we knew it had to have a jungle/tropical theme so we collected hundreds of pictures birds, lizards, snakes etc and had a very basic idea of what the whole design would look like. We knew from experience that once we started that design would evolve and change as it grew. Then came the day we got the chance to see the wall and O my word was it big! I mean really BIG, bigger than anything we had ever imagined we would ever have to paint. So what follows is the story of the making of a mural. |
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| We made two decisions straight away. First decision was to get at least a third of the mural out of the way on the first day by painting a nice cloudless tropical sky. The other decision was that because of the sheer size of the mural it would be impractical to sketch it out before we started. So apart from the animals which we very roughly sketched in as we went along, every thing, background, trees, foliage, flowers etc we would just paint straight on to the wall without first drawing it in, otherwise it would just take too long. |
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| These first pictures are at the early stage, I think this was day three. I worked on putting in the background foliage while Michael started painting in the trees; again all of this is free hand nothing has been sketched in at this stage. We both just mixed the colours we wanted, picked up a brush and started painting and just saw where it took us really. |
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| This is Michael working on the foliage of one of the trees, you can see from these images that our initial idea was to have a beach in the foreground, then we decided to paint in the sea breaking on the beach but as the mural grew we discarded this idea. This can seem a bit indecisive but as artists we know that any picture has to be organic and just grow and often go where it wants to go. You often have 'happy accidents' which you can build on and which really do 'make' the picture. |
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| Here you can get some idea of the size of the mural, the wall is about 6 metres high and we did the sky and birds from a scaffolding tower belonging to the onsite builders (who by the way kept finding reasons to walk through the room just to get a look at the wall!). You can see that we have begun to put in the sea now but we weren't happy with it. Fortunately we had one of those 'happy accidents' which changed that part. |
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Looking at the two pictures above you can see that an idea of putting in a lake rather than having a beach and sea is just forming. This was another 'happy accident' on Michael's part who slipped with the brush, stood back and looked at it and saw that it was good! So we went with it and began to paint in the lake which was great because it meant we could put some flamingos in and they always look good and are a joy to paint. |
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| You can now see that the beach has gone, replaced by the lake or lagoon and grasses. You can see reference pictures stuck on the wall with masking tape. These were the various critters we chose to paint in. All together we had over 80 animals in the finished mural including lots of lizards of course. Another of the important decisions that we made at the start was that I would draw freehand all the animals onto the wall and put an undercoat of white on them and Michael would then paint them in (though we didn't always do it that way round). |
| The placing of the animals was done in a very scientific way of sitting down at the other end of the room with a cup of coffee and a KitKat and staring at the wall! Actually it is important to stand back regularly and just spend time looking, any artist knows that observation is a major part of creating a picture. |
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| A lot of the foliage was just something that came out of our imagination as long as it looked vaguely tropical the same went for some of the animals such as butterflies and lizards, we just had a ball when it came to colours. One of the main advantages of doing everything freehand is that the finish mural looks alive and not stilted in any way. This is just one way of working of course, a lot of muralists really plan it down to the last square inch and map out the wall to perfection but we find the finished picture tends to look a bit too murally and stilted. We think its best, if you have the skill, to just start painting with your brush and see what happens |
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| Here I'm painting in one of the many butterflies, you can see the reference pictures stuck to the wall and the tortoise and lizard in white waiting to be painted in. Michael really enjoyed painting the elephant with the bird on its head! The important thing is just to have fun when you are doing this stuff and let your imagination run a little bit wild |
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| The tools we used were artist's brushes of course but also decorators brushes and rollers and sponges, we used a lot of ice cream containers as palettes as well as buckets. Paints were artist's acrylics which are water-based and good quality emulsion (latex if you are from across the pond). We then finished the whole thing with a really good quality matt sealer coat to give it some durability, very important in a kid's play gym |
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| While the whole project seemed a bit frightening when we first realised what we'd let ourselves in for we really did enjoy every minute of it and we did finish it before the deadline which was a great relief of course |
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| I hope you have enjoyed reading about the making of a mural. I will put some more images on the gallery page soon. Annie |
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