I was asked to create a mural for the Sheffield Farm to welcome school children visiting on educational trips. Luckily for me bright, bold, quirky and playful are totally my style and all very appealing to kids so it felt the perfect project to be my first large public painted piece. I would love it if more schools or businesses in Sheffield commissioned me to do mural work like this. It’s big and messy and makes me feel like a kid again!
The Process
The base layer was black paint. I started with a very basic pencil layer to indicate composition. Next I painted the piece with emulsion paint using a digital drawing I had created as a guide. I found it important to step back every now again and check the proportions of my work. This is a necessary step in big pictures, the bigger they are the more difficult it is to control distortion.
It took several layers of white before the piece started to look anything other than a bit of a mess. It’s important never to get disheartened if your piece looks bad at the beginning because they most often do! The benefit to the emulsion was that it dries pretty quickly so I could continously work on the piece. For the most part whilst waiting for a section to dry I could work on another, and by the time I’d finished the original section would be pretty much ready to start on again.
To finish the piece I used posca markers. These pens are like magic and work on pretty much anything. They aren’t the cheapest but there is no comparison between official Posca pens and other more inexpensive products masquerading as similar to Poscas. Nothing I have found has come close (although please comment on this post if you wish to challenge me on this!)
If you want to know anything more about the process, leave me a comment or get in touch!
