Toadstool Mural

The first two weeks of November, I did a commission of 3 murals at Mimi’s Magic Garden daycare center. They were not open yet, so, I was able to come in every day for 13 hour shifts, taking days off for the weekends. Since the center is named “Magic Garden”, Mimi wanted the main room, right when you walk through the front doors, to be completely garden themed. We planned the walls together. She told me what she wanted in general terms, showed me stickers and decals that she had planned to order before I agreed to do the murals, and then she let me interpret these things into scenes that I created.

For the Toadstool wall, she showed me a sticker that she was ordering online, which had a toadstool house on a little grassy hill and she wanted me to do something like that. The sticker actually had the toadstool just regular but with little buildings and houses on the edge of the “umbrella”, whereas I interpreted it into a more literal “toadstool house.” Also, funnily enough, when the sticker actually arrived, it was much smaller than she thought it would be and if she’d gone that route, it would have been dwarfed by the rest of the empty wall around it.

She also wanted gnomes, like the red caps that are often seen in lawns and gardens. I have always found those little old man gnomes to be creepy and I thought that having bearded men on the wall, even if they were tiny and represented fantastical creatures, might be a little odd for a daycare. Mimi was very good about giving me freedom and leeway to create, so, she let me design my own little gnome-like creatures. I took a lot of inspiration from Brian Froud’s fairies and pixies, Thomas Dam’s troll dolls, and Patricia Hedegaard’s goblin sculptures in their design, keeping the little pointed caps so we’d know these guys were gnomes.

Toadstool Wall

Size: xx

Time: 87 hours

Medium: oil-based paints

I did all 3 walls together at the same time, so, the time is how long all 3 walls took. To save time because I thought I had a deadline, I did each color for every wall, so that I didn’t have to go back and remix colors.

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For this mural, I made the scene tell a little story. I had in mind a kind of Smurf-like village with these little tree stump and toadstool houses, where these gnome creatures played in the magic garden, climbing flower stalks and riding caterpillars and bumblebees. Sort of whimsical, care-free and turning little things into big things for their world. Starting from left to right:

This part of the wall was actually thought of last. All the other gnomes were boys, so, I thought I wanted to make a representation of a female. The Troll Dolls by Dam were something I played with as a kid and because of their squat body designs and wide, flat features, the boys could look young or old in whatever you dressed them in but the girls generally looked like old women, no matter what dresses you put on them. So, that was what popped into my head when I thought of “female gnome”; a kind of older mother gnome. I gave her some babies to look after and took a design of an actual woman gnome/dwarf from Google that was holding a flower like a bouquet in her arms and transformed it more into an umbrella. After deciding it was an umbrella, I thought it made sense for water droplets to be coming down and kept the theme of “little people in a big world” by making it a watering can pouring “rain.”

In the daily life of these gnomes, the daddies work just like ours. Maybe they’re farmers/harvesters and they collect seeds and berries. Maybe they have magic powers and help the trees grow. Whatever they do for a living, I imagined them using bugs as beasts of burden: bumblebees to fly up to higher places or caterpillars to cross long distances in short amounts of time. Little baby gnomes play in the paths between the grass blades and as their papa passes by, heading home for the day, they hitch a ride on the back of the caterpillar. As they go along, a fairy swoops by, giggling and fluttering around, distracting and entertaining the little one who wishes to join their winged friend in the air.

I decided to make the caterpillar a monarch because it is one of the most iconic caterpillars and easy to recognize. I remember in Kindergarten, my teacher read us the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, and then we got to raise, as a class, a monarch caterpillar that made a chrysalis and eventually emerged as a butterfly.

When looking for pictures of flowers for the garden theme, I found some purple clematis photos that I thought were really pretty. I knew that there was going to be a lot of lighter and neutral colors for most of the Toadstool mural, so, I wanted the flowers to have a really deep, dark vibrant color. Also, I found a lot of different types of mushrooms while searching for inspiration and decided to put the ones I liked the best in the mural, to show a variety of fungi.

Sometimes the gnomes just sit on their mushrooms and relax, enjoying the sunshine and breeze. This little guy can see the whole little village, observing the goings on and day to day interactions between his fellows.

 

Since the clematis flowers are so big for these guys, they’re basically like trees for the gnomes. This little guy is climbing the stalk and shaking loose the petals. Uh-oh! He’s making a mess in the yard and now the old-man gnome has to rake them and clean them up.