Murals Soon To Be

Well, happy to report that I'm getting pretty freaking crazy busy with work for the near future!  I'll be teaching on the weekdays, mural-ing in the afternoon and weekends, and trying to squeeze in some other life stuff in between.  This is the life of an artist trying to make it their full-time job: trying to perfect the art of "The Hustle".   It's piecing together things to make up a steady job.... for me that means teaching contracts, mural and illustration commissions, and random odd jobs make a living. Making your dreams come true is hard work! 

Anyway, just thought I would share with you a bit of the design process I go through for mural commissions.  It starts with a discussion with the client.... me picking their brains for anything that will translate into images. It's like a game trying to piece together what's in someone else's brain and come up with an image for it.  For the beach house mural below, the clients had a hard time nailing down a style or direction they might want, for fear of "disrupting my creative process" with too many requirements.  I did know they wanted it "beach-y", and they liked pelicans and blue herons. So I did this:

Design #1 was waaaaay "out there". I kinda figured it would be too much, but you never know what people will respond to. 

This one was less crazy, but still bright and somewhat whimsical, not super realistic.

And this one was the most realistic.  This is what the clients chose.  The cool part of this one though, is that it will include bits of actual shells and rocks and things, glued onto the painted "beach" on the wall.  It will have a nice 3-d effect that I'm pretty excited about. 

They wanted the pelican more "stout" looking, so this was the final design they settled on.

I like to super-impose my sketches (or sometimes just photoshop collages) onto pictures of the clients' actual wall spaces. This way they can see what it will look like. The next mural I'm planning, is a big 40' banner for a client's fenced in porch.  I knew they liked Zinnias, and that they wanted it bright and celebratory.  Here's the progression of their designs:

The final design: add nasturtiums, pond background, keep the hummingbird. 

I'm SOOOO excited to paint this one.  This is right up my alley, and is something that I would paint for myself... if I had a 40' porch railing that needed a banner mural ;)

I'll keep you updated!

Corie