I have been asked to lead a mural project this June in Pontiac, Il. The event is being called "Chief City Runs with the Dogs" and it is sure to be the big Letterhead event of the Summer! We will actually be painting 16 murals in 4 days. The event is being hosted by the Diaz Family with help from community members and the city of Pontiac, IL.
Although these events are all very different, it is a bit of a tradition to produce a copy of the mural design in one form or another. Sometimes the pieces are auctioned off to raise money for the event or donated to a worthy cause.
Below is the piece I am working on for this event. Today I would like to talk about how I got to this point and why.
A common question I often hear is. "how do you get the little copy of the art transferred to the large version on the wall"? I will cover that in more detail later, for now lets talk more about creating a concept rendering that will eventually be put on the wall.
I mostly wanted to talk today about rendering a piece of work and share how this particular art is being produced. For this project, I decided to go back to my roots and produce a completely hand rendered illustration both for a painting reference and to donate to the auction. You might ask, "why do that with all the technology we have at our disposal these days." Ah, the point of this whole post!
One of my first "real" jobs was at a specialty advertising firm in Northwest Wisconsin back in the B.C. (Before Computers) era. Yes, before the Mac vs. PC debate there was graphite, color pencils, french curves, and paint. At this first job I was usually handed a stack of business names and was asked to come up with some quick ideas that the sales staff could drop by with and hopefully sell. I did all of this logo design and lettering by hand. I then hand inked most of the work and then used the process camera to ready the art for printing.
Over the years I transferred some of the skills I learned back then over to the computer. Many of those skills however have been gathering dust in the recesses of my brain. Once in a while I call them out and put them to use again.
In this case I wanted to develop an original Alphonse Mucha Style border around the whole piece. The subject matter for this concept was from the era old Alphonse would have been laying down his color, so it seemed appropriate. I first drew the border scaled at 1.5 inches equals 1 foot on the mural. I then inked the entire line drawing of the border by hand.
There was a fairly early concept submission deadline so I had to produce a colored version of my art up front for approval. I decided to quickly render that sample using a scanned version of the hand-inked border, then colorize it in Adobe Photoshop. This way any additions or changes could be done and approved before all the time was spent hand rendering the original art. Actually a couple minor changes were made so this worked out well.
I am currently about 2/3 of the way through the rendering of this piece. Once again you might ask "why use the old school, tedious, by-gone methods"? There are a few reasons I can think of. A hand drawn or painted piece of art work is always just a bit more dynamic than a piece created entirely on the computer. Doing it by hand also give me time to think about what I am actually doing and change and evolve things as I go. This process also allows me to become way more intimate with the whole design! So, when we set up to paint this mural and I have several people helping me at any given time, I will know how each element should look.
And finally, I think a hand rendered piece of work has much more meaning and value than something that can be printed out at Kinko's. I hope to have a frame ready for this piece at the event and have everyone that helps sign their name on the original art. Now I just have to go and actually finish it!
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