Monsters in the garage

The photos in this blog show the mural that I've painted in the garage, and I thought I'd share with you how I made it. I'll start at the end with the finished mural. Here it is:

It started with a design that I drew in my sketchbook. The actual result differs quite a bit, but then whoever sticks to their plans? Sometimes designs just mutate by themselves. I started the mural off by painting a white square. Actually I didn't, I started it off by visiting B&Q and buying some paint. Without that it wouldn't have worked. I chose masonry paint, as it was to paint on bricks, but the colour choices weren't great, so I stuck to black and white. It was either that or bottle green and brown, and who wants that?!? I think black and white on brick looks really cool anyway.

Ok, the next bit was the white square. 

The square forms the basic shape of the white background. I then started painting in the monsters in black. I did the outlines using a dry brush first, so if I didn't like the result, I hadn't committed too much and could still change it. The painty way of drawing an outline in pencil I guess. 

Where the monsters go out of the square I also used a dry brush to continue the outline (you can see this with the monster on the left and the arrows) I then finished off the white inside the outline, and a monster grew out of the square. I thought this was probably the easiest way to tackle it, rather than painting a shape then colouring it in again, and again, and again. And so I repeated this with all the other shapes.

I think the most difficult part of the whole process was painting into the gaps between the bricks. The garage is shoddily constructed and it seems there is not much mortar holding it together, so the gaps were quite deep and capable of swallowing almost a whole paintbrush. Also, I had to evict a number of spiders from these gaps, but I'm hoping they like it now I've white-washed their houses for them. I was also hoping to continue some of the spaghetti shapes over floor and up the other wall, but I decided against it in the end. The floor would require too much cleaning first (otherwise I would just be basically painting on DUST ). Also, when I've painted in the garage in the past I've noticed quite a lot of leaves and more DUST blow under the door and stick to the paint and it's really annoying. I'd need to either tape myself into the garage or get some serious draft excluders, and it's just too much work for something that a car's going to parked on top of anyway.

                     

                                        All images copyright Rebecca Gregory 2014