The Temkin Tribune

More Pavillion mural pictures...

In this picture you can see the unfinished tree with the fuse box which will become an overly, ornate bird house by the end of the project. This little boy is my favorite kid in the mural, he is the son of one of my dearest friends...The next picture is a close up of him.  The mural ends in the middle of a huge wall so I decided that a good way to end the mural but not have it look out of place would be to place the tree at the margin. But there was still the problem of the fusebox so I decided it should be camouflaged as a bird house and the little boy just sort of "showed up" in the space as I was working it all out.  Sometimes my characters just show up like that...and "request" that they have a certain space...I am glad I listened to him...He was right.  He needed to be hiding behind this tree, in this position.  Smart boy. 
The group of children was fun to paint.  I love that the boy with the glasses looks so much like the child I know that his father (who works with my husband) said "Oh, that is Ian alright.  You have the shape of his head just right!"  Ian doesn't ear glasses but his caricature "decided" that he wanted some round ones.  I did not resist his request. I wonder if Ian will think my painted boy looks like him?   I will have to ask. 

 

Here is the first stage of blocking in the the skin tones.  I learned a trick for this from my 5th grade teacher.  She taught us that every skin tone is really just a mix of red and yellow...Think of mixing catsup and mustard and getting peachy colored Thousand Island dressing.  You can add more red or yellow or brown  or white to modify as you like.  I usually mix up a large amount of the first skin tone and modify aliquots of this for all of the others.  The real trick is to remember WHICH skin tone you used for which person in the mural.  You don't want peachy arms with a brownish face. 

As you can see, I got a bit ahead of myself with Ian's face. You can click on any of the small pictures to get a pop-up of the full sized image.  The next picture is the finished group of children.  I loved painting the plaid shorts and the boat shoes...too much fun.  The yellow dress is one of my favorite dresses from my childhood..well not exactly, but that is what I had in mind when I painted it on the little girl who is my daughter but with several modifications.  In the last picture you can also see that I was thinking of using a second green to highlight the bubble-like bunches of leaves on the trees.  However, I abandoned this idea because it made the trees too complicated for the feeling I was going for .

Mural upstairs at the Canton Pavillion Ice Rink

I thought it might be fun to write a post about my "process" for creating a large mural...in this case it was over 33 linear feet long and I believe it is 10 feet tall.  That is quite a lot of wall space to navigate and in this case I also knew I was going to need to take a couple of fixtures and a play structure into account when considering the composition of the mural.  My goal was to brighten up the corner of this somewhat shabby space and make it inviting for kids and their parents alike.  I also thought it would be nice to give the space the impression of being warmer than a room at the local ice rink could really every be.  The playground theme was a natural and met the needs of the client..."Something with children.  Something cheerful."

Many people have asked me how I "map" out the wall...well, to be honest I do not. If there are to be figures in the painting I always start with sketches of them.  I imagine the people I am going to draw and start sketching.  I like to give my characters "personality."  Sometimes they will be a picture of a real person I know or a composite of several people.  In this mural, all of the children are kids I know.  I use my own kids too but I often give them different hair or eyes...but if you look carefully and if you know my children you will always find them in any mural I do that has children in it.   

I love to draw and paint children and I love to draw every type of child.  I really had a chance with this mural to represent a group of children from different backgrounds playing together.  You can see a little boy hiding behind the tree to the far right of the mural and on the right is his playmate, the girl with the braid, counting for their game of hide and seek.   There is a boy in a wheelchair, flying a kite...the wheel chair was a challenge because it is a very complicated chair to draw.  I simplified it quite a bit so that I was able to maintain the feeling of simplicity I was going for with the overall mural. I'll get some of my sketches scanned soon. I often work out an entire page of facial features and then I figure out who needs which expression.  I don't want to end up making someone look angry when they are supposed to be having fun in the park together.

After I have several characters worked out I go to the prepared wall and with regular chalk, I begin to work out the proportions and positioning for each figure.  I may draw a very detailed chalk picture or I may just draw a rough outline of the figure just to indicate placement.   
In this mural, I wanted to make sure everyone was the correct proportion to each other but I did not want to end up with all of their heads being at the same level in the mural. I got around this problem by having a gently rolling, grassy hill as the background.  So you can see the boy on the skateboard and the boy in the wheelchair are positioned high on the grassy hill while the girl with the ball and the boy hiding behind the tree are locate much lower on the wall.  I think it adds visual interest and movement to an otherwise, very static picture.    Another thing I did with this mural, to add movement was to add the three birds.  One is standing on the sign and the other two are flying in the direction of the birdhouse. The kite also give a sense of movement by implying that there is a bit of a breeze...see how sneaky painters can be?  I To give the eye more to follow in the bottom portion of the mural I added randomly placed daisies...I think they are quite effective in helping the eye travel over such a large space.

After the chalk outlines I start mixing my skin tones.  This is one of my favorite parts of painting people.  I block in the limbs and the head and neck.  Often I have to paint these two to three times because the background will show through.  Next I shade the ears, just under the neck, and anywhere else that needs it.  Then onto the clothing. I have no rules about how I paint the clothing except that I like a ton of detail.  I paint the basic shape of the shirt and pants or dress or skirt and then after they are dry, I go back in and paint the stitches, buttons, grommets or whatever detail that occurs to me.  The details really make the mural. 

After the children were nearly finished...I leave the shoes and socks for last, I don't know why but I always seem to do this...I start to fill in the background, the grass, the trees and any other objects or animals that have found their way into my design.  The trees in this mural are very childish, very stylized because I didn't want to take a wy from the details of the children.  I think it worked.  And the very last thing I painted was the ornate bird house in the tree.  If you look very closely, I think you can see that the birdhouse disguises a very ugly fuse box right in the middle of the wall.  I just hope the maintenance guys will be able to find it when they need to reset a fuse. OK, so I guess I cannot post anymore pics with this post...I'll get some more pictures up in the next couple of posts.