It’s been more than five years since I last updated my blog but this project was so much fun that I thought it deserves a post!
I have been asked to do a circus themed mural for my friend’s kids room. I have been asked to do a mural before for a client but since I had no experience, no space to try it out beforehand, no idea how long it will take and how to go about pricing I had to turn the offer down.
This time however it felt like a great opportunity to try it all out. I had a free hand and could do whatever I wanted within that ‘circus’ theme. The wall was a generous size (430 x 250 cm) and I didn’t feel the tremendous pressure in case it goes wrong the same way I would feel with a client that was not also a friend.
I think my friend imagined it like I would come one morning, draw something on the wall, stay for a tea and leave. Well… that couldn’t be further from the reality. I am not a great painter and I’m sure that if I painted something directly on the wall it wouldn’t look much different from what she or her kids could paint on the wall themselves.
I knew I will have to have a design with the proper layout first. Then I needed to find the way how to transfer all the elements using the right proportions onto the wall. I initially thought I would use a projector and trace it on the wall by hand but for various reasons that didn’t work. So I printed the whole design onto large rolls of paper and traced it onto self adhesive stencils using a big glass table as an improvised ‘light box’. The placement of the stencils took a lot of measuring but it all worked out perfectly. I only encountered one issue and that was that sometimes the stencils would take down a bit of the underlaying paint (in case of those multi-coloured elements) but fortunately it was mostly an easy fix!
It took about two weekends but was worth all the time invested! What do you think?…
