Nursery Mural

Hey everybody! We finally finished that mural I always said I was gonna do for my children's room!

I started with some designs in my sketch book as usual. I did these in acrylic inks and rollerball V.5 ball point pen.
First I thought it would look best in warm, no, hot colors, red, orange, etc.



The holes in the design are where the doors and windows are in their room,the lower, darker part was to be chalk board paint, the kind that turn's your walls into black boards. You can get it at Home depot. I used some copper ink stamps to see what metallic paint woould look like with the flat color.

Here's a design for the serpent that I liked.



Then I though the whole thing was too harsh and decided to make it a winter wonder land.





We ended up painting the kids' room blue so the winter scheme was out, too mono chromatic and all. So I went back to the warmer colors, here's the final painted BG. (the drawings are by my friend Camille Reeves Lucier)

The stars in the sky are the same copper ink that I used in my sketch book. I also used gold ink with 2 or 3 different types of star stamps. I used a floral stamp in the border with the gold. All this metalic paint took forever to dry, 8 months in fact. That was a long time to stear clear of the wall especially since the flowery border is exactly at hip level.



Here's a better look at the town section.

Some of you may notice, I stole the tree style from my friend Andrew Brandou's burning LA painting. As you can see I did end up painting the lower part of the wall with Chalkboard paint.



Next I moved on to the serpent. I didn't just want to paint the main figure. I wanted a collage of some sort, so I decided to build it out of gatorboard, cloth, and paint chips from Home Depot again. They just don't make construction paper as rich or with as many variations as paint samples plus, paint samples are free, if you have the guts to just load your self down with them. The harried underpaid staff at HD never seemed to mind.

Here he is in progress,


and here's the finished mural!



Take a closer look at the guy, Jen jumped in and helped glue the scales on, paint the back fins, and make the ribbon out of satin.


After all this, Jen and I wisely decided to just do one wall. Maybe some day we'll get up the gumption to do the rest of the designs, but don't hold your breath.