Oh, how much fun can a person have!!! Not only did I just finish the mural last week, I just put the finishing touches on this first image of Buttons and Just Be two days ago!! I have 2 other summer images to come, one which is further back in this blog of these two characters planting a vegetable garden, and another idea of Buttons playing in a soup bowl pool, holding a ping pong ball and wearing an old fashioned one-piece bathing suit!

I really enjoyed creating and painting this mural! I had a chance to improvise on the image, as the original piece which inspired this was in the proportion of a square, and this rectangle is three times longer than it. I also decided to try to move the viewer's eye around the image, making the middle of the image lighter and brighter, and the edges more dark. I hoped the viewer would then move from the middle to the edges and discover what surprises were there - a family of quail, a snail, and butterflies and dragonflies. I especially love the two swallows flying in the middle of the image! When I painted the water, I used turquoise and white, working wet on wet, and discovered that it appeared as waves when I stepped back from it. Also using the darker blue on the outer edges seemed to infer shadows close to the bull rushes.

I've been working on a mural at my friend's daycare. She gave me a picture of what she wanted, but the space she had was 3 times the width of the original. I had a lot of inspiration to fill the space available - after all, I couldn't just make the frogs bigger : the pond would look like a puddle! I had lots of fun deciding what animals are part of a pond's ecological make up. I also learned about how painting with just one colour doesn't work for me - I used about three colours of green, brown or blue to create texture and light reflection on surfaces, instead of "flat" or a single colour for objects.

I started with the greens because I needed a variety of greens for most of the background. Then I painted the browns, then the water.

I'm pretty much finished here, I painted the birds next, and now I have to paint the insects. I have to do touch ups as well.