As Artist-In-Residence at VALA Eastside, I will be creating a giant painting 35-feet x 6-feet for permanent installation in Redmond Town Center (RTC). I call it a painting and not a mural, because I will be working with brushes and fine-art materials, not the usual spray paints and rollers that are typically employed for large scale murals.
Painting outdoors in October in the Pacific NW is not a good idea so we decided I would paint on plywood panels
which would be subsequently installed on the site.
The site itself is oddly shaped so before I could start, the RTC management commissioned the creation of plywood panels sized to the site. [Technical note: The plywood used here is half-inch MDO (Medium Density Outdoor) plywood, which is specifically designed for outdoor usage, and is most commonly used for highway signs. It is generally weather resistant].
Painting outdoors in October in the Pacific NW is not a good idea so we decided I would paint on plywood panels
which would be subsequently installed on the site.
The site itself is oddly shaped so before I could start, the RTC management commissioned the creation of plywood panels sized to the site. [Technical note: The plywood used here is half-inch MDO (Medium Density Outdoor) plywood, which is specifically designed for outdoor usage, and is most commonly used for highway signs. It is generally weather resistant].
Panels on site 35' x 6'
Plywood comes in standard 4' x 8' pieces. To fit the space required piecing together about 7-8 boards of plywood cut to size. A backing frame was also built on the site to support the plywood.
Removing the panels and moving them indoors was easier said than done, as plywood has significant weight. [Technical note: Three-Forth inch MDO is stiffer than half-inch MDO, but also weighs 50% more, which is not a trivial matter if working on pieces like this alone. For most painting or murals, half-inch MDO should be good enough, unless you specifically need the additional thickness and strength]
Removing the panels and moving them indoors was easier said than done, as plywood has significant weight. [Technical note: Three-Forth inch MDO is stiffer than half-inch MDO, but also weighs 50% more, which is not a trivial matter if working on pieces like this alone. For most painting or murals, half-inch MDO should be good enough, unless you specifically need the additional thickness and strength]
Panels moved indoors and ready for priming.
Although MDO plywood is designed for outdoor use, the plywood still needs to be sealed with some form of latex or acrylic primer (your local paint store can make a recommendation). Generally two coats are recommended, including on the sides and back. This took a couple of days to finish. Getting the sides was tricky as it required lifting the panels off the ground and keeping them there till the primer dried.
I previously created a maquette (smaller, scale model) of my intended painting. In order to reproduce the maquette design, I would first have to transfer the design from the small scale to a larger scale. For this I used the time-tested method of gridding both source and destination and transferring the design one grid at a time.
For the panels, I first sketched out a grid by drawing horizontal and vertical lines spaced 1 foot apart. (For lack of a 8-foot long ruler, I ended up using a piece of metal frame that I found lying around):
For the panels, I first sketched out a grid by drawing horizontal and vertical lines spaced 1 foot apart. (For lack of a 8-foot long ruler, I ended up using a piece of metal frame that I found lying around):
Not shown in the picture: the extraordinary amounts of measuring that needs to be done to ensure your lines are perfectly spaced and and parallel...
On my computer, I then sketched a proportional scaled grid on top of a photo of my maquette design:
Printed out, I now had a gridded design I could simply copy onto the larger grid using charcoal.
 Proportional copying from paper onto panel. |  On top you can see the maquette with my intended design |
The advantage of using charcoal is that it creates temporary lines that can be easily brushed off, removed or moved around. The downside is, you can lose the charcoal lines just as easily. The last step in transferring the design is to cover the charcoal lines with a thin layer of paint (in this case Raw Umber) which becomes permanent as it dries.
Finally the design is captured and the panels are ready for paint:
On goes the paint:
[Interlude: How to paint a mountain in 8 steps:]
Sometimes to get the right effect, you have to do some crazy things, like making 8000 (!!!) of these vertical strokes:
At this point I realized I needed a better way to document the progress on the mural. So I purchased an inexpensive Interval-o-meter for my camera, set that up on a tripod on a timer, and started taking photos of the mural every thirty seconds. Later I transfer the photos to a tool like Windows Movie Maker, and turn the stills into a video. It takes 4 minutes of stills to produce 1 second of time-lapse. The following time-lapses capture the progress for the next 2 weeks of painting. You will see a lot change in the few days, and very little change towards the end.
( 1,500 individual trees. I must be crazy!)
Keep your eyes peeled below at around the 7-second mark:
That completes the first phase of this project, which was to put in the landscape background:
Standing next to the painting to demonstrate scale
The second phase of this project is to take a large number of drawings of imaginary creatures contributed by kids and find a way to populate the landscape with creatures inspired by those drawings. More about that later!
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