Mary Thiefels and her husband Danijel Matanic are the partners of Treetown Murals. And this past July, they once again enlisted me and Marin Thoburn to assist them in starting a new mural. Martin & I had done this for them before when they painted the McKinley building mural on N. Main St.
McKinley photo here
We used a projector and a digital file of their artwork to project onto the wall where the mural would be. This is the finished mural:
Working at night, they then painted the outline of their artwork so they could fill it in during successive daylight hours. As Mary put it: when we were done, they had a giant page from a coloring book.
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| The "coloring book" finished outline. |
This wall was a bigger challenge than the first time - literally and metaphorically. It was 10 stories tall, and we needed to get onto the roof of the bank across the parking lot.
Some views of and from the roof.
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| From the ground, daytime. |
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| From the ground, nighttime. |
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| Jeri Hollister & Tom Bray on the roof. |
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| Tom Bray & Martin Thoburn on the roof. |
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| The sunset from the roof. |
The projector setup was interesting. We had to do the projection in 3 setups, for the bottom, center, and top parts. The bottom required that the projector be turned upside down so the projected output would reach the bottom. The center and top parts were with the projector right side up.
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| Projector setup for the bottom part. Note the safety line going off the right side of the frame. |
We had wood barriers and clamps used at the front or the rear of the table, depending on how the projector was tilted.
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| Wood placed at the front to raise it, and a barrier at the rear to keep it from slipping off the table. |
We had a laptop with the full color graphic and several layers we used to align the projection correctly each time.
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| The full wall, showing the center section getting set up |
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| The alignment grid, with vertices at each actual intersection of the wall finish. |
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The bottom part of the projection.
They wanted to do the person standing at the bottom first, to get that height correct. |
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| Martin scrutinizing the projection alignment. |
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Projection showing just the white light output from the projector.
We used this so they could see their work without the full color overlay. |
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| The white light showing the work so far. |
And of course, there was a lot of waiting time to fill...
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| Tom reading while they painted. |
Finally, just a nice shot of Mary on the scaffolding at night, waiting while we got the alignment right for the center section of the mural.
That's it for this entry. Until next time, have as good time!
