Paint a mural on a wall

“I was pretty excited at this point, starting to see it come to life. I was offered the two big walls, but asked if I could also paint the center and top. At a certain point, I started to feel like I wasn’t going to get to the top, but a couple days before I finished I knew I had to make it happen. That damn textured wall. Here you can easily see how textured the wall was. The white primer is showing through and when I painted leaf shapes it’s not solid, not covering the surface. I kept telling people that a lot of walls that murals are painted on are more like the ocean, with waves in them, but this wall was like the earth with caves and crevasses. I had to push paint into the wall’s surface for it to go on smoothly. I soon discovered that foam brushes are the best thing for detail on a wall this size.”

“When I got to Phx, I primed the wall with a tinted primer and that night we used an old school projector to project the image onto the wall. The three folks helping me made the whole thing possible, and I could not have done this on my own. Abbey Messmer and Rafael Navarro helped project, and Amy Decaussin helped me paint the lines onto the wall. Below, you can witness these weirdos. <3 The next day after the lines were in, I started filling in the blue/grey values. We got scaffolding donated to us, which was a tremendous help, and meant we could add more detail to the top part of the mural. Amy also helped me lay in the first values. After most of the grey values were down, we started to add the colors. The colored paint was also donated, so it was a bit tricky to mix the colors I thought would go well. I generally use quite muted colors but have been trying to open myself up to brighter hues. The mural definitely needed to be bright since it was set on such a monochromatic background.”