Mural

Hey guys!
I haven't had a whole lot going on in the past month, but one thing of note is that I was asked to paint a mural for a local youth center.  Teen Central, the youth center, is a non-profit business, so I gladly did it pro bono.
After a bit of discussion about the content of the *mural, the director and I decided on a pretty straight-forward design that featured a couple youths.

I drew the design in photoshop.

 I had a friend print it out on a transparency sheet and we went out in the middle of the night and I traced the line art with a sharpie on the cinderblock wall.

I then realized I should have prepped the surface, after doing some research, so I did that around the lines.  That included sanding and washing the wall so it would take the paint better.
I bought cans of All-Weather acrylic paint, one of every primary color.  I started on the flesh tone on the boy first.  I decided to paint it cell-shading style, since blending would be nearly impossible with the materials I had.  I had the base (caucasian) flesh tone and created a highlight and shadow tone from that.

The wall is east-facing, so the sun is shining directly onto it.  When I first put the flesh tone on, it looked fine, but when I removed my sunglasses looked like the color of the wall, and I was practically blinded by the reflected light.  Luckily, the paint dried much darker, and it all worked out!  It wasn't necessary for you to know this, but I thought it was a fun tidbit.

I had to repaint her flesh tone a couple times because it kept on drying waaay too dark.  I was able to save it using two or three highlight tones and two or three shadow tones.

I started the lettering a few weeks later, due to conflicting scheduling.  I had an idea of what I wanted the lettering to look like, but I ended up free-handing it on the wall.  I measured it out using the bricks.  That was really time consuming.

I got my finger in the edge of this one :(  You can see the edge where the rest of the wall was repainted.  I had a bucket of the paint they used for that, to go around the edges and use it as an eraser 

where need be.

This is final painting.  I didn't get any photos between these two, but I added highlights and shadows to the lettering, and filled the wall color in, and I painted the lines in black paint.  

So that's it, sports fan, I hope you like it! You can see it person if you happen to live in the area.  It's on Wolf Street in Manheim, PA.

 If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or email me.  I'm available for commissions, contact me for details