Art Night – Mural

The Start

Creating a mural has been on my dream list for years – with the help of my community, we made it happen. The process started by collectively aligning on the style and content of our mural. We wanted it to be fun and playful, flat colors, and reminders of local animals and plants.

As the sketches rolled in, I brought them into procreate to layout the design and make the designs cohesive since we had so many artists at work. I had a color scheme in mind and folks helped me narrow in for the final selection. While we worked to finalize the design we used a cool, April evening to get the wall primed! The first layer of many.

Process of bringing everyone’s designs into Procreate and making the work cohesive.

The Painting

Once we had our wall primed, it was time to bring up the final design. Everyone pitched in to trace the projection onto the wall. The alleyway was tight so we had to trace a bit at a time then move the projector down. As one group traced, another group started the splashes of color on the wall.

We gathered many times (with a break for the brutal AZ summer) until each design was filled according to the design laid out in procreate. At this point we had basically made a huge paint by numbers and it was so amazing to see people light up as they saw their sketches become a piece of the large scale mural.

✨The Finished Piece ✨

We learned which colors took multiple layers, listened to quite the array of music and put our brushes back in the fridge between painting sessions. And with time, we have the finished piece!

I couldn’t be more proud to be part of such a wonderful community. We had 25 different contributors throughout the process, countless hours, and only one decent spill of paint (by yours truly). Already dreaming up the next one!