Mural Progress

This is the project I’m currently working on.  It’s pushed my other projects to the side, so I’m in a hurry to finish it.  I had to take a break when we went on vacation, but now I’m home again and I can see the final stretch.  You can see updates of the progress here. 

Originally, this foyer was painted with flat white, like the rest of the house.  I think I’m a teensy bit agorophobic, because the darker and more closed in a space feels, the more I like it (to a certain extent.)  I did a similar mural in our old house, based on an article in a magazine.  I made two stamps for the leaves, one small and one large. In the old house, I used the small stamps, which were about three inches wide.  These leaves are a little over four inches.  To give a point of reference, the high window is four feet by four feet square.

I painted the tree trunks and stamped the leaves in June, and a friend suggested I ought to add crows (my favorite animal) to the mural, so I spent a few days sketching crows. Once I had the sketches to the right size, I glued the sketch paper onto thicker back paper, then cut it out so that I could trace around it easily.  I painted them completley black, with glossy house paint.  I debated leaving them that way (because I am not sure if the glaze will obscure the details or not), but in the end I decided that they needed more depth.  I mixed some white paint with the same glossy black and used the grey for highlights.  Posted is a detail of one of the crows.

The next stage is to paint over the entire mural with glaze+paint.  I’ve got a picture of the canvas I used to test out the glaze and paint ratios.  The glaze (and a little water) gives it translucency so that you’ll be able to see the image behind it.  It has enough color to tie the room together, and having a background color closer to the branch and leaf darkness will make the whole effect more subtle.  The next stage is really the part I’m most worried about, because for one, all the brush strokes will show and I don’t want it to look too busy/messy.  Also, I don’t want the color too pale, yet I don’t want the trees so subtle that you can’t tell they’re trees.  I’ll post pictures of the completed mural.