Make-It Monday: A quick mural job

I spent part of my weekend doing a mural project of a different sort.

A local church has elaborate airbrushed murals covering virtually every wall in its children’s wing. A recent construction project took out part of a mural in an entryway leading to a couple of classrooms, so they hired me to repair it.

It was more difficult than it looked, as I was not only using a different tool (paintbrush vs. airbrush) but was working on a different surface than the original artist and had to try to blend my efforts into what was already there.

After a couple of less-than-satisfying attempts to make my paintbrushes replicate the luminosity and softness of an airbrush, I decided it made more sense to match the previous artist’s work to mine rather than the other way around, so I used a brush to sharpen up some of the existing lines and then sort of feathered the new work into the old while trying to preserve the integrity of the original design as much as possible.

I forgot to take “before” pictures, but here’s what it looked like when I finished. You can see some of the original artist’s airbrush work at the corners and on some of the walls in the background.

The post at the corner is the original artist’s handiwork. About a fourth of the mural on the right-hand side was missing, so my task was to complete it using the same style as the existing work.

If you look closely, you’ll see a slight color variation where the old surface stops and the new surface starts.

It’s not the most exciting project I’ve ever done, but it was a good exercise, I learned a couple of things from it, and everybody who’s seen it seemed happy with it, so I’ll call that a win.

It also served as a good reminder of why I need to learn to use an airbrush at my earliest convenience. Ron ordered me one for Christmas, but it just came in a couple of days ago, so I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I have a feeling our basement walls are about to get really interesting.

Emily

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