34~ Mural 2012: Music-Room Theme

I had put the music-room off until after the wedding. It wasn't really a music room ~ it was just a musical theme. My design would be painted on a closet door in the music area of the room, near where the upright piano would stand. As we became pressed for time (and as I grew tired of painting), I hinted at dropping the elaborate transparency in favor of a simple-text "Music Room" lettered on the door, as Brenda had originally envisioned. Brenda was now set on the design I had shown her, though. Teach me to think so elaborately ~ everything has to be complicated. I have to admit, I was looking forward to the creativity involved in it, if not the actual work of measuring and drawing it. Transparency motifs such as faux-glass doors are a specialty of mine. My gesture drawing was a straightforward view into a room. There would be a black-and-white-checkered linoleum floor and some musical instruments hanging on the wall and a music stand. I knew it would pop. I picked a toned-down green background to complement the purple surrounding wall.

I knew that the molded indentations in the door would be tricky because of the straight-line geometric design of the linoleum. They were, and so was the door knob. I decided to do graduated tones for the linoleum, to give the illusion of going back into space. I started with the blackest black at the bottom, adding a hint of tint with each successive line as I went up. I also graduated the white, starting with the whitest white at the bottom and adding a hint of pale green with each row as I went up. I made it just slightly duller in tone, too, so that the white at bottom was brighter than that at the top.

A truer perspective would have been a very broad, flat looking perspective, with very wide squares of linoleum at bottom, each one very compressed in height. Then the floor wouldn't look as if it came right up at you. Still, I liked the look of this. I painted the main shapes of the musical instruments freehand without any actual model, but did pull up models very frequently to help with details, such as buttons and gizmos on the clarinet and trumpet, strings and frets on the banjo and guitar. 

Music-Room Door Mural in Progress

An unfortunate aspect of the design was that my lettering needed to go on the cross-piece of the door, and that was just where the musical instruments were hanging. Yes, I was the one who had put them there. I paint into a perspective of my own, getting a feel for the space as I go. That's just how things happened to work out. I probably should've gone shallower with the linoleum floor, bringing the green down much lower ~ but I wanted the pretend music-room to be deeper, not squeezed in flatly against the viewing space. As it turned out, lettering on the instruments wasn't too bad, and didn't obscure the instruments or look too fussy and crowded. I started the music-room door on the 7th and finished it on the 9th. (I didn't work on the 8th.)







Mural 2012: Wednesday, November 7, 2012 (Music-Room Theme)