Painting a Mural

A step by step process

Hello.  My name is Karly, and I was fourteen years old when my parents came to me with the idea of painting a mural on the far wall of the garage at our town home on Silver Star Mountain, The Golden Sun.  They offered to pay for all the supplies, such as paints, and told me a friend and myself would have a week and a half to complete it.  I agreed, and invited my friend Lauren to help me with it.  She is one of my best friends, and very artistic.  She agreed immediately, so we set to work finding an artist whose works we would like to paint.  When we were twelve, our class took a four day field trip to Tofino.  While we were there, we visited a museum of a local First Nations artist, Roy Henry Vickers. Lauren and I remembered that artist, and decided we would like to use his works as inspiration for our mural.

At a local bookstore, we found a calendar on Roy  Henry Vickers which contained the sort of paintings we remembered from the museum.  We decided to combine three of his paintings, Fisherman's Wharf, Whaler Islets and The Saddle.  From Fisherman's Wharf we took the moon, form Whalers Islets we took the sky, and from The Saddle we took the mountains.  We made a few preliminary sketches, then made the final drawing.  We drew a grid on both the drawing and the wall.  then, square by square, we transferred the drawing from the paper to the wall.

Next came the painting.  We bought a quart of blue, red, and yellow paint and a gallon each of white and black from Colour Your World and set to work.  Using an assortment of brushes, we began with the black, then the sky, then the mountains, doing second, third, and sometimes even fifth coats of colour until it was just right.  We finished at 10:00 PM the last night and set to the difficult task of cleaning up.  That took an hour.

Finally, we sat back and admired our work. I hope you like our hard work...We really think it paid off!

August 1997