“So, the project was cancelled.”
Or was it?
On January 1st of 2023 I got a text from my client saying that he “chickened out” of doing the painted glass backsplash and decided to go with tile. But, he said, he’d still like me to do a beach scene, but on canvas.
It turns out that he has a guest bedroom that his grandkids, two young girls, stay in when they come to visit. We arranged to meet so I could take a look at the room and talk over what he wanted.
The room was decorated in blue and orange with fun throw pillows with illustrations of fish and starfish setting the beachy tone.
I put a small, 24″ wide x 12″ high, abstract painting of mine in the shot to establish scale so that I would be able to create mockups of my ideas in Photoshop.
My client restated that he wanted to continue with the beachy theme. He left the content wide-open beyond that. I could see from other artwork in the room that he favors expressive, whimsical illustrations paired with brushy expressionist elements (see the print below).
If you know my work, I usually paint in oil in a realist style. A very long time ago I did draw cartoons, and I have more recently done a few travel sketches and illustrations, but I am not an illustrator so I don’t have a illustration style that I could just pull out and create something with.
I did what any artist would do: I scoured the internet for style ideas. One of the artists I favored was MGL Meiklejohn. I like the whimsical feel and bright colors and thought it would work well in the space.
I did a mockup in Photoshop to figure out what size would work in the room. Aside from that, I knew what the client had already paid me and wanted to make sure I was giving him a painting in a size in keeping with that amount. I settled on 48″ wide x 36″ high.
I sketched out a few ideas, various beach scenes, but one after another, when I placed the sketches in the mockup of the room wall they just felt lost on the wall. Finally it hit me. What the room needed was a mural; a piece of artwork that would cover the entire wall.
One of the commissions I took just before this one was for an illustration printed on wallpaper, creating in effect, a mural. That commission never came to fruition for various reasons, but I had researched printing wallpaper on-demand.
I presented a thumbnail for my favorite idea as a wallpaper mural and got approval from the client to go ahead.
I tussled with how to execute the illustration, knowing that it would be printed large scale. If you draw something on paper and scan it, or illustrate something on the computer in a bitmap program, you can end up with jagged or blurry edges. The solution to this is to create the illustration in a vector-based computer program such that you can enlarge it infinitely without such artifacts. I chose to use Adobe Illustrator.
Now, I subscribe to the Adobe Create Cloud suite so I own a copy of Illustrator, but I had only used it for creating my logo and the odd project here and there. I was not an expert. And, I did not have a graphics drawing pad and pen and was too cheap to buy one for just one project. So, I did the entire thing with a mouse. Added to that, I am left handed, but use the mouse with my right hand. I felt like I was drawing with a bar of soap, in the wrong hand.
My cat, Maisy, did try helping though. Or maybe she just likes fish.
It probably took much longer than it would have had I known what I was doing, but after many hours of Googling techniques and stumbling around, tackling each element one-by-one, I got it done.
The client loved it so I ordered the wallpaper from a company called Murals Your Way.
The wallpaper arrived and I delivered it to the client. We had agreed that he would hire a professional to hang the paper. Just finding a wallpaper hanger who would actually show up to do the work was an adventure in itself, but after many months, the job was done.
Shortly afterwards the grandkids came to stay and gave it their seal of approval.
So, what started as one thing morphed into another. I gained experience and skills and two little girls were thrilled that their grandpa created a special space for them. I call this a success.