Thursday, June 2, 2011

Mural Progress, Part 2


We've been at the mural for three days now but I'm a bit late posting the progress because I've been at the mural site more than I've been home.


First we, *ahem,* tested the projector.


Then day two started with priming the brick. Measuring out a perfect rectangle that's 19 feet tall takes some work, and we got up around 6 am to beat the crazy heat wave we've been having.


Next we waited for nightfall so we could project the design onto the building and trace it with sharpies, which was the toughest part of the process so far. Not only did we have to work until about 1 am to get it done, but we also had to build a separate scaffolding rig to get the projector high enough and line up the image on the wall perfectly. It's pretty tricky to project an image that's not distorted in any way, so we spent a good deal of time just figuring it out.


My original plan was to project the design in sections, but even though I created a series of registration marks to line everything up it proved too tedious to make multiple projected images match up perfectly. So we sat the projector on its side and did the whole image at once, which I was trying to avoid because I knew making a computer image 19 feet tall would just produce a blurry mess when we got close enough to trace it. To solve this problem we used printouts of the design as reference to make sure we were creating accurate outlines.

It was one heck of a long day! More progress will follow!



3 comments:

Cup O Swank Studio said...

Wow! I didn't know this was going on! I'm so glad you're blogging about it! I can't wait to see the finished work! I can't tell you how much we need real artists to do real things in this area! Your talent will really add a shining focal point to the neighborhood. I'd love to read the newspaper article...could you post a link? :)

Keith said...

Enjoying seeing the progress. Keep us in the loop.

Anonymous said...

this is a great example of one of the interesting aspects of being an artist: creating shortcuts and using different tools in different ways to achieve the final product, by any means necessary.