18~ Mural 2012: Painting the Fawn

Although I was working hard on the bay window that Friday, I had to take a break now and then. Call it artist's sensory overload, or just plain being tired: tired of working on those bays, tired of standing on a ladder, tired of thinking it out. Those things were intricate. They were fun, but hard.

One of the breaks I took was to add a fawn to the mix of little animals in the mural. It all started with a joke, one of those crazy suggestions I kept getting from the local farmers who enjoyed coming in to look at our progress. Don't get me wrong ~ if an idea just wouldn't work or I really, really didn't want it, I nixed it; just nipped it in the bud. I mean, you can't have a hunter in the bushes, popping off coyotes in a church mural. This deer idea started the same way. One of the guys said, why don't you put me a deer in there? And a turkey?

Well, the turkey got nixed. There wasn't room. The old guys tried to hold their ground. "Why, there's room on the branch there for a turkey!" they said. "Just put a big-old tom turkey there." Yeah, ha-ha. But the deer... I had originally planned a rabbit over by the pond. The reeds ended up being a major element there, and we added that banner overhead. I had room in the foreground, but in the end, I decided to forego the rabbit. For one thing, we were down to the wire, and a rabbit shape ~ a realistic one ~ can be tricky. Also, he'd look funny just stuck on there. I'd probably have to add some more greenery.

Well, I wasn't gonna give the old men their ten-point buck (I knew that's what they wanted. Hunters.) The corner spot between the tree and the library looked as if it could use some special touch. I decided I could put a little fawn, curled up behind the roots of the tree. I had some pictures to go by, of a real baby deer. Most of them looked pretty similar, hidden in the leaves, curled up, with their heads tucked in. I quickly drew and sketched the fawn, and enjoyed doing it. "I don't think the guys had a 'Bambi' in mind," I told Brenda. (It's not specifically Bambi, by the way. I went by a real fawn.) 
At right is a photo of the fawn as it looks within the context of the corner wall.







Mural 2012: Friday, October 12, 2012 (Fawn and tree)