Painting castles & dragons and other ramblings...


Here's a few photos of the mural I'm working on in the medieval room, to sorta show the process. When painting something like this you work from background to foreground-- whatever is closest to you you paint last. The reasoning is, your lines are going to overlap some as you paint, so if one object is in front of another you of course want the lines of the nearer object to be on top. Trust me, you don't want to try to paint the background last around something in the foreground, you'll screw up the edges of the object. Been there, done that.

So anyway, here's some background scenery. Sky first, then trees, and lake. Here you see the grass is one flat color, I paint the predominant midtone color as a base first... in this case a bright green for the grass and brown road...





... and then I put in the details into the grass and dirt road. (Except in front of the wall, I have to paint the wall before finishing the grass that's in front of it) And, I have the base coat on the castle too.





Next, I have the details added to the castle, and starting the base coats on the dragon.




I'm following a picture that the owner printed off the Internet. We haven't figured out why the dragon seems to be giving the knight the "thumbs up" sign... or he might be flipping him the bird, I don't know.

The owner has had some sharp-looking business cards printed for me. And, so far I've had one person ask me about painting something on a motorcycle part for him and the owner's friend asked about painting something in her daughter's bedroom. Some business would be good, I need to get some money rolling in, faster than it's been rolling out.

So here I am starting this mural-painting stuff after all these years. A funny note about that- it's another case of "Mothers are ALWAYS right". Case in point- in 1992 I was at a crossroads, in the same week I was faced with two choices:

1. I had just started a new job selling vacuum cleaners that week
2. My mother said to me, "There's a class you should take on how to paint murals and then you can go around and paint murals for people."

At that time in my life I was very uninspired and didn't really have any confidence in doing anything with art. So, I chose to try to sell vacuums. And I sucked at it (pun intended.)

However, I will never say I made the wrong choice. If I look at all the events that happened after that, one lead into the other, and I doubt any of it would have transpired the way it did if I had taken the other road. It's like in the movie Mr Destiny... you can take one pivotal point in your life and say "What if that happened differently" and the outcome years later might be completely different.... but not necessarily better. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason. Call it fate or predetermined destiny or what you will, but a lot of things happened the way they did because I took the vacuum job. And I regret none of it.

So now that I've ventured down one fork in the road, it's finally time to travel the next. Mom may have been right about the mural thing... it just had to start at a delayed time.