Valley Mural

I learned so much working on the murals at Mimi’s Magic Garden daycare center. One thing that some people might not know is, this past spring, when I painted the elk and deer murals…all that I painted were the animals. As told in my entry “Our Story So Far…” when I arrived, my mother had already painted the sky behind the elk. And after I finished the bull and moved onto the cow, my mother painted the grassy hill underneath him, then moving on to do the one under the cow as well. While I worked on the deer, my mother painted the trees and sun background. I originally tried to paint the ground but at that time, I was plagued with insecurities and got overwhelmed with trying to follow the picture exactly. So, my mother painted the ground beneath them as well.

Working at Mimi’s, I had to depend totally on myself for the art portion of the murals and it really pushed me to discover new ways of doing things. My strength, whether painting or drawing, has always been faces and bodies, animals and people. I have never been very fond of backgrounds, often leaving them blank if I can. And nature? Forget about it! Having to depend on myself, however, I was forced to problem solve and work through it. I debated doing everything in flat colors, going for a cartoonish style but as I painted, I kept accidentally making things more realistic. “Accidentally” is a term I use when I intend to do one thing and fail but end up doing something better instead.

Valley Mural

Size: 7’3” x 7’

Time: 87 hours

Medium: oil-based paint

One thing I was fairly confident that I knew how to do were the trees in the foreground. When I painted the antlers for the elk and the deer, I developed a technique for making the antlers look textured. A little alteration and color differences and I knew that textured look would work for tree bark. One of my first surprises was painting the grass along the bottom of all of the murals. My brushes aren’t very big but I’d need to cover a large amount of area with the green paint. So, I did this by making vertical strokes with the biggest brush I had. After a few strokes, I’d run out of paint and need to get more on my brush and start reapplying it. Since the green I used was dark and grew lighter as the color faded from the brush, what ended up happening is that the overlapping strokes began to look like shaded blades of grass. I was originally going to make the ground flat colors and cartoony, going back over it to make the colors more solid. However, after seeing the effect I’d achieved, I decided to leave it that way.

Another accident was when I painted the trees in the background and on the hill. When I first put paint on the walls, it doesn’t go on solid, often showing my strokes and the background colors coming through underneath. This happened when I painted the treetops. I knew I wanted to at least give things highlights and shadows, so, I got my light green and began to apply it to the fronts of the treetops where the sunlight was shining. The first tree I put it on, it looked super thick, all in a clump, and as I tried to lessen how heavy I was applying it to the trees, my dabbing of the brush began to look like leaves, as seen from far away. So, I decided to keep adding layers of color in the exact same way to capture the natural look of it.

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When Mimi described her vision of the “magic garden” she mentioned bugs and animals doing human things like “mowing the lawn” to show that this place was magical. I knew that this mural would be extremely green, so, I made one of the bugs a ladybug to add that splash of red. I couldn’t let go of the lawnmower bit but when I drew it, he was the only one doing yardwork. So, I made the grasshopper clip the hedges, because in my mind, “garden” isn’t just a field of flowers or the woods, but a garden that is tended.

One of my fondest memories of childhood was catching salamanders and frogs from the pond with my aunt Emily. She was 2 years older than me, so, we were fairly close and she was like a cool older sister to me. So, I knew I wanted to add a frog to the mural but any other bugs I thought to add didn’t seem like they’d be dancing with their main predator(magic garden or not!). To add another splash of reddish color, I made it a salamander. This is probably my favorite part of all 3 of the garden murals. I love these two, dancing in front of the pretty water, the salamander with little freckles on his knees.

I put critters on the upper level of the mural to balance everything out. One of the things I worried about was that the frog and salamander were dancing but nobody would know why. Even after I put in the bird, it felt like it was such a small part of the picture, it might not be noticeable what was going on. So, I added music notes so that people would understand that the bird was singing and that’s why most of the critters were dancing.

In her original brainstorming with me, Mimi mentioned having big unicorns on both walls on either side of this doorway. I didn’t want this to become so overwhelmed with unicorns because it might make things feel uninteresting or the theme might come across as a “magic unicorn garden”. After all of her descriptions of things that I could do, I knew I wanted to have fairies on one wall, gnomes on one wall, and bugs on one wall. I worried that a picture with a unicorn in the middle and a bunch of bugs around it, all of them doing different human things, might come off looking too busy or cluttered. So, I decided to make the daddy unicorn small in the distance and make the focus of the wall all the bugs and critters doing things.