31~ Mural 2012: Turtle and Pond

As we had approached the date of the wedding, I had held off on drawing any element on the wall that I couldn't paint before that weekend, when the room might be used. That meant that the settee, the music-themed door, the scalloped roofs, cornices, and signs, had had to wait. There were also quite a few finishing touches to be done, but now we had no real deadline. Our goal was just to finish the mural as soon as possible.

I had been wanting to put a turtle and maybe some fish in the pond. I had some pictures of turtles and of ripples in water. I looked the pond over and decided on the spot. Once I was able to visualize the critter, he was easy to paint. The ripples were slightly more difficult, but not too bad. The ripples were why I had held off on doing the turtle before we'd had to knock off for the weekend. I knew that, once I painted the ripples, I'd probably need to ripple and highlight the rest of the pond. I had wanted to do that for a long time. I didn't like how flat and blue the pond looked. Rippling the pond went well and I was pretty pleased with the result. Below are some before-and-after shots.

Mural 2012: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 (Turtle and Pond)