Mural Decal 1 of 4- Done

I’ve been working for a few weeks on redecorating and updating one of the bathrooms in the house. Even after removing the very outdated wallpaper border, and painting a much brighter shade of blue, I still have much to do. Part of the new decor will be a series of murals, depicting mushrooms, and various plants and a few snails thrown in for fun. Yesterday afternoon I completed the first of the panels.

Rather then painting the design directly on the wall, I painted it on to an adhesive backed fabric that we use for removable/re-usable decals. This way, when I tire of the designs in there, I don’t have to paint over them, losing all my work. Rather, I can just peel them off, and save them or move them to another room.

I sketched out the room, measured the areas I had to work with, cut my material to size, and just started sketching.

I laid down a thick base coat of color, and then working with thinned paint, applied washes to shade, and again to highlight, a time-consuming process to be sure, but gave me the effect that I wanted.  After I was done painting, I sprayed it with a clear coat of polyurethane to protect the paint from scratches, humidity, and cleaning.

I’m looking forward to completing more of the mural, and will share pictures as I get it all completed.

What is on the worktable this week

   I’ve been working for a few days on some linoblock designs, my first steps into an art form that I’ve found intriguing for some time now.

Those who know me well, are not terribly surprised that the majority of my designs are of mushrooms. I did mix it up a little and included a snail in the mix this time. Mr. Snail is rather my favorite of the four blocks, and prints up beautifully.

These two are my first and second blocks, I’ve learned a lot since these first two, carving technique, design dos and don’t. When you are learning as you go, and teaching yourself from tutorials and how-to articles, you make a lot of mistakes, though…as I’ve heard before “we aren’t making mistakes, we are making experiences”. I’m hoping to take a class at my Community College this coming fall semester, I’ve heard that they’ll be offering a printmaking class for those of us that want to learn more. I tend to learn hands on, so that would give me the opportunity to learn “proper” techniques, and the process a little better, as well as try out other aspects of printmaking.

I hope in the near future to start offering prints of these and other blocks in my Etsy shop.