Pretty, but very time consuming

Something that I thought would take 3-4 days (USING TAPE!)  turned into about 9 days.

methods for the zigzags

At times I was just hating Sherwin Williams for doing this to me with their paints.  I COULDN'T use painters' tape.  I was using a metal straight edge thing that painters use to make a straight paint line.  But  it wasn't easy.

 There is still some messiness here.  I went back over a good many areas with a small fine arts brush.

Chevron Pattern

I agreed to do a currently popular design called a Chevron pattern.   Unfortunately for me, I didn't know that I would not be able to use painters' tape with this new Sherwin Williams paint.  But before I knew this,  I tried using Frog tape to mark the points of the design.

These pieces were falling off.  So next I just pencilled in the lines.  

 I used a laser level as well as an ordinary hand-held level to get it exact all the way across the wall and the 45 degree angles.  Each diagonal line is as close to 12" as I can get it.  The height of each layer is 8"tall and 8" wide.

Am I done with this one?

I'm hoping I am done.

To get this smeary effect with these paints, I need to remember to do this add-paint-in-strips trick.  It's almost the only good way to make the blended (smeary) look of the 2 white-pink lines on the above pic.

Next come the lighter streaks

These paints dry so fast that it works better to load 2 different color paints onto a foam brush then drag it across the ceiling. If I want to blend further than that then I'm putting just retarder on a clean foam brush and lightly dragging this across the area.  

( Pushing down will just lift the paint back off)

Still gotta put the streaks through it to make it look tie-dye. It may not look 13ft x 13ft, but it is.

Going to more expensive paints

Sometimes you've got to

use the more expensive paints.  I had to go buy the Blickyrlic Studio Paints to get the right

opacity and blending quality.  I used those paints here for the blue section and green/blue

interface areas.

Think I know what I'm doing.

Ummm..... uhh.... I think I know where I'm going with this.  I'm using Blickyrlic Florescent paints.

13 x 13 feet

Ummm....well.....

is this looking somewhat like a tie-dye pattern?

Sometimes you just hope you know what you're doing.

In starting a new mural yesterday, I reached a new level of pure exhaustion after I fought this 6ft scaffold out of my car and assembled it into this bedroom.

There will be a tie-dye pattern on the ceiling of this room after a month. ( I hope.)

My own steps in art with my computer

I'm putting these sketches up ( partly to remind myself of my own methods of doing them).  These were
first sketched out on paper. Then scanned into my PC, then edited with Adobe and Corel Painter.  Using a Wacom tablet.

I'm altering the right figure's arm here, (scaling and lowering it)

The red line shows where I was relaxing his pose.  That's completed in the images above & below this one.

I used the paint bucket tool in Corel and the chalk and blender tools here

The indian guy's arms are too short.  I'll fix that later.

I

I felt the need to somehow do a partial log of the many hands I've drawn.  Are hands not the hardest objects to draw?  There is one picture here that I didn't draw.  I took a photo and then colored in right on top of the picture using Corel.  Sometimes that's just the only thing you can do.

scene with snake and alligator

 This is from another graphic novel I'm  working on.

I'm enjoying this particular one.  If I had put the text in it then it would make this scene more understandable.  I didn't count the hours it took to complete this - but it was something like 10 hrs.

The glow-in-the-dark stuff had to be used sparingly on that coral reef mural.  You had to really gunk it on heavy to see any real difference.  And if you did that then it clouded the underlying bright acrylic paint.  That project is finished though.  And I've worked on a graphic novel that has turned into something that's just too long.

All the colored paint is on there.

The owner wants some glow-in-the-dark effects added.  I haven't used any of that kind of stuff before.  But I'm gonna do it soon on these walls.   I'll have to see if I can paint it on and still be ok to cover it with uv-protectant varnish.  ( Will it still glow in the dark if it's sealed with that stuff.   I'll post on that later.

It's otherwise DONE.

It's the most colorful painting I've ever done.

The decision was made to have the

 octopus a little more unfurled.  Of course you've gotta paint white down to make almost anything

else opaque or you'd see the dark coral right through the red arms here.

Maybe 5 more days to finish?!

I didn't add retarder to the paints here.  This means working fast in sections and blending with your fingers sometimes.  I'm usually wearing latex gloves here.

Reworked. Again.  I just didn't like the

way they looked the first time.  I sanded off some of the yellow and reapplied shading (greys) and then a thinner yellow.

Wasn't sure how to paint this.

This green anemone was something I considered difficult (until doing it).

I used straight dark green (shown here) as a background then mixed in this red (to tone it down) then added a little white to do the separate stalks.

The orange and red paints on the right, (AGAIN - 20 YR OLD PAINTS!) were used for the clown fish.

always-challenging; Acrylics

 This Liquitex BASICS paint that I'm using here is about 20 years old.  Still good enough quality to use!

Sometimes you screw up and then you're free-hand painting things ( like I'm doing here with these fish).

This lavender hue is being put on quickly and will gel somewhat then I put on a dark charcoal shade on top.  Then I'm taking fingertips to it to make it look like splotchy coral.

I'm shading this fish before I ever put coloration on them.  The yellow I'm going to add is so translucent that you'll see all this shading.