29~ Mural 2012: Cut Pattern for Bench.

On Wednesday, October 31st ~ Halloween ~ we came in knowing two things: it was the last day to work on the mural before the wedding; and it was a half day. On Wednesdays, we always had to knock off early. Besides, this night was Halloween. We both had things to do. Brenda was particularly busy on some other Halloween projects, so I had it mostly to myself. The major themes of the mural were done. The piece looked like a complete piece, which it must do, for the weekend. There were still quite a few projects left to do: some major, some semi-minor. They would have to wait until after the wedding.

Since I couldn't start any big painting projects, I thought it was a good day to start another project I had been avoiding: the bench. We'd first talked of putting a park bench beside the "library" (the closet door). The bookshelf was going to sit there though, so we then decided to put it by the treat shop. To fit that theme, we thought that a café chair would be nice. I sketched a several, then looked up some real ones to compare. I settled on my design. In thinking this out and discussing it, a simple park bench had now turned into a fancy, probably hard-to-draw, settee (easy enough in a gestural sketch, but hard to do as a full-scale project).

The park bench would be almost full sized and have curving, geometric lines. Free-handing it would likely be a big mess. A pattern could solve this problem. I taped a yellow sheet to the wall, did some measurements, and started free-handing the design onto the yellow sheet. Then I cleaned up the lines and used a Sharpie® to finalize the drawing. I just did one side of the bench (one half of the symmetrical pattern), knowing I could turn the pattern over to do the other side. I would take it home to cut it out. Meanwhile, I still had time for one more mini-project...

Gesture drawing: one of the early bench designs

Gesture drawing: fancy settee and bay window with cornice

French door not used

Mural 2012: October 31, 2012 (Cut Pattern for a Bench)