17~ Mural 2012: Bay Window Rough Sketch

Rough Sketches, Color Studies for Bay Windows

On Friday, I came in primed and ready to work on those bay windows. We had taken pictures of the prepped, sketched area. had printed so I could play around with it, make some color decisions. I may be bold enough to go straight from a gesture drawing to the wall with a pencil, but I knew better than to try such a thing with areas of intricate color combinations. Even I'm not foolhardy enough for that. I have a set of artist's crayons (similar to children's wax crayons, but softer, packed with pigment, and water soluble; I'd first heard of artist's crayons when looking at David Hockney's work. Some of the toys come in certain colors I wouldn't want to change, but I still need to see how they'd work together. Here's my rough cheat sheet:

These are somewhat the worse for wear ~ you can tell they're my working copies. I did change a couple of the toys. I sketched in the teapot that took the place of Jonah and the whale. I looked at two different color versions of the stacking toy and stuck the second one in just to compare the colors. The tin man, slippers, and inchworm didn't make it into the final design. I didn't want it to look too crowded. The treat shop stayed about the same. The color schemes for the windows are different: brights for the toys, pastels for the treats. I could have gone with brights on the treats, but I really liked the way the soft, pastel colors worked out. I knew I'd enjoy painting it. The toys look a little stuck on ~ not fully integrated with the background, and they look that way in the final painting, too. More about that later.

I made pretty good headway in a day, but still, time was pressing. I began to worry about the end date. The thing is, I can't give a play-by-play description of the bay-window paintings. I can tell we got really busy, really serious about finishing this project, because suddenly the pictures stopped, the emails stopped, the Facebook stopped. I worked hard, felt as if I wasn't making a lot of progress, and was tired at the end of each day. I don't have much documentation on the bays.


Mural 2012: Friday, October 12, 2012 (Bay Window Rough Sketches)