Odessa Brown Children's Clinic - Immersive Stairwell Mural

I was invited to create a stairwell mural at the OBC Clinic with the goal of encouraging children to take the stairs, while celebrating the themes of diversity and community and recognizing the large immigrant population in the area that has migrated there from all parts of the world.

For this project I decided to create a mural titled 'World Tree' - where the tree is a metaphor for shelter and community, and represents a gathering place for 'birds' of 'all kinds'. Birds, like humans, often make long migrations, which highlight not just their tenacity, but also their fragility and resilience. The mural thus celebrates diversity, neighborhood, migration, and welcoming community spaces.

At 2 stories tall and four stair-flights long, about 23 feet high by 56 feet long, this wrap-around mural is not only difficult to photograph and best experienced in person, but even the in-person viewer cannot get a full sense of the image, which is best appreciated in this architectural diagram:  ​

This artwork was completed in several stages starting with a scale model acrylic painting:

The model painting is only 1 foot high by 4 foot wide, so I had it professionally scanned at the highest possible resolution:

I then mocked up possible designs with birds, and decided to only focus on the tree area of the image. I researched colorful birds and hand-drew them on my iPad:

These drawings were then composited onto the background using Photoshop. The final design, after numerous rounds of experimentation and drafts looked like this:

The design was then mapped to the various portions of the stairwell and images clipped to the actual dimensions of each area. The design was then sent to a vinyl printing company that printed the vinyls at full scale and attached them to the wall. Here are some more photos of the installation: