"Looking Back..."
The Process
During my sophmore year at Notre Dame San Jose, I designed and lead a group of students to paint a mural. The mural was a "corner mural" painted on 12 pieces of plywood, stretching 48 feet long and hoisted 10+ feet in the air.
The design process started in January of 2015 and the final strokes of paint occurred early July 2015. The mural itself was unveiled in May of 2016.
Initial Concept and Pencil Sketch
There were many iterations and ideas I had when I was approached to design this mural. I was given free-reign in terms of the theming, so I decided on a theme very pertinent to my art which was
time.
Digitizing Sketch and Final Design
After I was satisfied with the sketch, I scanned it into my computer. At the time, I was using Adobe Photoshop for all of my digital pieces, so I spent the next couple of months finaling the design, coloring, and making edits as needed.
The mural was orginally in a street corner parking lot, due to this, a viewer would have to walk around the corner to view the other half. In the final design, shape language and color were used to convey the two sides. They were supposed to be contrasting each other while still feeling cohesive and part of one design.
Transfering Design and Painting
A group of 30+ students who were dedicated to helping with trasnfering the design and painting worked with me over the course of a couple months. We came up with the idea to project my design onto the pieces and trace over the projection.
The tracing finished around the end of the semester, and we then started the painting process as soon as we could. To paint the mural, we used a paint by number technique where sections of the design correlated to numbers assigned to paint cans.
Unveiling
The final mural was finally unveiled to the public in Spring of 2016.
You can read more about the mural and unveiling here:
KQED,
Metro Silicon Valley ,
Notre Dame San Jose Annual Report.