Please forgive my delay, and allow me to finish up the posts for the Kewanee Walldog event, and more specifically, the painting of the Roger Reiman wall.
I arrived in Kewanee, IL on Saturday July 6, 2013, a bit earlier than the rest of the Walldogs. I drove down the weekend before the event started, to do some of the non-typical tasks that were required on our wall. This included assisting on the mounting of the upper name panels and the contour cut flags.
Here is a picture of the wall as I arrived. Just to give you a scale to work with, the main mural panel is 12' tall X 40' wide.
Here is the wall with the name panels mounted in place, using 3M VHB two-sided tape and heavy duty rivets.
Since most of the background was going to be based in sepia tone, I went ahead and blocked out the areas where each image was to be painted. Here we have added the contour cut flags as well.
Here I am starting my little corner of the project...
On Wednesday evening, July 10th, we started to project all the sections of the mural that still needed to be sketched out. The city of Kewanee was able to turn the street lights down for us on Wednesday evening, which makes our task a bit easier.
We had a great group of painters who joined in to make this such a successful project. First off, is our dear friend Bill Riedel. Bill came all the way out from Little Ferry, NJ, to join us in the hot summer sun to add his amazing talents to our wall. Bill painted several of the portraits you will see on the final mural, As well as good portions of some of the other image sections. Here he is working on Evel Knievel's portraits.
We also had Ted Turner from up Milwaukee way, handling as many tasks as he could. Ted painted the far left flat track racing machine, as well as helping me paint the streamliner one evening, at about 10pm. Ted also joined in with Bill to paint the numerous bikes on the upper right corner of the main panel.
Dustin Hobert was also on board to work his magic with the airbrush. Dustin painted the large portrait of Roger, as well as a panel with Roger and his Mother.
And on the center section, we had George Sedlak, and Lili Payne working on the Evel and Roger section. George is the owner of Sedlak Studio, and is the artist who painted many of Evel's helmets and motorcycles back in the early 70's.
Well, it seems this post is running a little long, so I think I will post the completed mural images on my next post. Hopefully it will not take another year to get the final chapter of this project out there!
