Mural!

Last weekend I started on a mural overlooking our pool, based on an illustration from BILLY TWITTERS AND HIS BLUE WHALE PROBLEM. An illustration that is available as a t-shirt design in the Zazzle sidebar on this blog. (cough)

Here's the wall "before." The pool didn't actually have to be green to get this process started, but I found the brackish smell and the heady vapors of a hundred dollars worth of algaecide put me in the seafaring mood.

My wife, seen here, had an idea that may seem like old hat to regular mural-painters, but which I found ingenious: tape the design up in sixty or so pieces, then take one piece down at a time and reproduce it in paint underneath. That way I can look at the enlarged design on paper in my hand, and the surrounding paper pieces will guide my lines and ensure everything connects. Like those grid-drawings everyone did when they were younger.

This is as far as I got in one afternoon. Should take another to finish up–I'll post the whole wall when it's done.