Translating Drawings to Mural Cloth
Eli and I (Salina) have been busy doing all the background work to get the mural up! It’s the unglamorous stuff: Waiting for shipments of polytab and paint, adjusting the digital sketches so they are the right size and scale for the wall, and tracing the small drawings to scale on the mural cloth. Here are some photos of what that process looks like:
Eli is coating 20ftx5ft strips of mural cloth (also known as Polytab or interfacing). The cloth is like a thick but porous paper and absorbs the primer really well. It feels like a skin of paint that will then be adhered to the wall and look seamless! Eli shared this image of the aftermath of some cloth priming!
I (Salina) am picking up the primed cloth and tracing the images from our drawings. These are the butterflies that appear throughout the mural. I am tracing from the drawing I made and the white lines are a grid that is 1ft by 1ft. This helps me know if my scale is right and allows me to adjust the projector or my mural cloth to make sure things are lining up.
Here you can see me tracing my drawing of Moe! I like to take photos, then make a digital drawing on my laptop, and then trace from there. To me this helps me feel like I’ve gotten to know the person I’m drawing. I know their face a bit more and when it’s blown up so big, I can more easily see if something doesn’t look or feel quite right. If you’re interested in drawing bigger or just practicing your art you can do this too! You can use the traditional grid method to blow up smaller drawings and designs OR you can practice drawing by tracing! All good work just takes practice. Below you can see the line drawing with some numbers and letters that tell me what paint I plan to use in each segment. I will then mix some colors and start painting in my studio onto the cloth.
Our mural cloth comes in loooooong strips of 120 yards. They’re 5 ft wide so we can either make super long strips and draw or paint on them OR we can break it into smaller more manageable pieces. Below you can see how many pieces I had to break up the drawing of Moe into. This will make it easier to bring to the site and allow others to paint on and will be easier to paste up once everything is dry and sealed.
We will be out on the site this weekend (Saturday May 22nd) starting to paint! Check out the poster for days and times of community paint days/parties below!
