triple mural, trust the process
Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a roll with mural work. I had a client reach out to me over Thumbtack (a very hit-or-miss-but-sometimes-awesome app for connecting people to small businesses) and what started as one small project turned into three medium-to-large projects. Initially, my client Celeste asked me to take the closet off her daughter’s room and make it into an imaginative hideaway of sorts. She gave me a loose idea of what her daughter is in to, but she is two years old, so the focus was purple, animals, imagination. When I went over to their house to meet Celeste and her husband and see the space, what started as one mural, turned into three! They have two kids with their own rooms plus a play room, and they thought, why not do all three if we can. I consulted with them for a bit, hung out in their living room chatting for a while, and then created a Pinterest board for ideas and started mock ups.
Working with this family was an absolute dream job scenario. They had enough of an idea to know what feeling or colors they were going for, but they wanted me to be creative, take a feeling and run with it. They gave me just enough feedback to steer more clearly but I never felt like they were trying to be overly controlling of the process. They also (and this is so important) trusted me when I said the mock up wasn’t going to be exactly replicated because a digital design and something on a wall just simply will look a little different (try as I might!). While I was working, they’d occasionally pop in to say hi or let me know if they were leaving the house for a bit, but otherwise completely trusted me to let myself in and out of the house and ask for things if I needed. I hope I can work with them again some day, or maybe just become friends, who knows.
We first started in the Imaginarium (formerly known as the closet) and I painted every inch of wall space available to me. I pulled inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, Where the Wild Things Are, and the colors and animals that the kiddo likes. I wanted the space to feel magical, with larger than life flowers reaching up to the stars, fairy houses and toadstools, and some of her favorite animals: rabbits, bears, foxes, and butterflies. Seeing a kid’s face light up with excitement when they see their new customized space is truly such a joy and a feeling I will never tire of (makes me think of Extreme Makeover Home Edition tbh–I watched a lot of that growing up).
The next room we worked on was for the baby of the family. Celeste had looked at my previous works that are on my website and said “I really like the Little Si painting you did, can we do something similar and add animals?” and I said a big hell yeah. I like trying new things, but misty mountains will always always have my heart in a big way. When working on this one, I really went in on subtle details, and bringing my skills learned on canvas to a larger scale was unbeatable. When I think about the technique transfer, it is hard to explain in writing. But in a canvas work, I would work on clouds by having really thick wet paint applied generously and then blending it out with a large, fluffy, dry brush; blending it into the background paint and swapping between wet paint application and dry brush blending. I found that house paint dries much faster and blends in a totally different way, so I essentially did an inverse process. I had painted the majority of the mural already when I started on the clouds. I had a cup of water, a kitchen sponge, and a dry paint brush ready to go. My technique was literally the exact opposite of what I’m used to, I had a completely dry ‘canvas’ aka wall and then after applying a bit of the cloud color I used a damp kitchen sponge to blend it out. It took a couple of tries but I think it turned out incredible! And I learned a new skill to add to the library of techniques and tools.
The last mural was for the playroom, and we wanted it to feel like a storybook. By the time I was working on the design, I was a little worn out on woodland creatures so I asked if we could go with mythical creatures mixed in with a couple of real ones and Celeste was all for it! The older kid’s favorite magical animal is a unicorn, so I started there and then included favorites of the parents as well as a couple of my own favorites, which is how we got to a unicorn, capybara, owl, baby dragon, phoenix gryphon, and deer all sharing a woodland space. By the time we got to this piece, I was in a groove and had the time of my life painting and listening to a podcast (Collective Imagination made by my oldest friend, Paco–check it out). There’s something special about painting magic creatures while listening to a DnD podcast for sure.
Overall, this was a breath of fresh air, and in many ways an anchor over the last few months. I spent about 7 weekends working on these murals over the course of 3 or so months. Having a full time job in addition to being a small business owner has its challenges in that way. If I was a full time artist, I could’ve gotten all these done in one month, but instead it had to be spread out because I could only work on Fridays and Saturdays and sometimes that was just half days or working around nap schedules. We all had to be flexible and trust the process quite a bit on this one and I’m so grateful that this family took a chance on me and my somewhat slow process. We marveled together that their kids would grow up only knowing their rooms as being painted with my art. They would see their mountains and animals, trees and flowers, every day of their childhood memories. It makes me really emotional to think of my art being an anchor and a key piece of someone’s entire life. I hope that they love it forever the way that I will.
