Happy New Year, happy new Mural!

Happy New Year to everyone!

I have been a bit quiet on the blog front as I have been working on a mural for a lovely local firm called Topmark. They are specialists in bikes, windsurfing and water sports, should you ever need advise on such matters in this area these are the guys to see, they really know their stuff!
Topmark are opening a new showroom area for kids and ladies bikes so wanted a plain wall painting with a mural. Bill, the owner wanted the subject to be on the local area and of course to include items sold in the shop. I came up with the following design which we all agreed on.

This is the version which I used as a working template for the large mural, hence the blobs of colour all around the edges!
I came up with this very stylised scene of actual places as I needed to be able to fill large areas of the wall quite quickly and too much detail would have taken far too long to complete. I decided to base the design on old railway posters of the UK such as the following:

As you can see, my design is a little less colourful though as I didn't want the room to be too dominated by strong colours. Because my mural is much larger than a railway poster I felt the colours needed to be  less dominant and enhance the room rather than dominate.

The first thing I had to do after agreeing on the rough and visual was to do a line version of the drawing onto acetate. I then took the acetate and an OHP and projected the image onto the wall, once this was done I could then copy the design to scale with a 2B pencil.

Next stage above, I started filling in the big areas with my paint roller. One of the most time consuming things to do was actually mixing enough paint to fill, in some cases, quite large areas. I used Winsor and Newton Galeria flow formula Acrylics as they are pretty hard wearing and perfect for indoor murals.

I could then start to block in other areas such as the clouds and mountains:

I will post on how the mural progresses in my next blog. Happy painting all!