Category: Mineral King

Doesn’t “Mineral King Mural Finished” sound like a newspaper headline? My “client” (what a stuffy word) Mrs. Cowboy called a reporter friend from her local newspaper to ask her if she’d like to write up our project, but the reporter was covering a mule packing class that day.

Because of the heat and time constraints, I went out to paint early in the morning. It is easy to do this when you are staying in the building where the mural is. This location is 2 hours from Three Rivers, so I had to make the most of the time available, which was 2 days.

This is how it looked at 7 a.m. on Day Two after 7 hours of painting on Day One.

I detailed things for an hour, then stopped, knowing I’d get back to it around noon. I was hungry and don’t believe in the myth of the “starving artist”. Mrs. Cowboy has New Hampshire Red chickens and guinea fowl, so there were fresh eggs for breakfast.

Oh my, that tarp was so very necessary.

I coated everything a second time and tried to detail as I went. But, just as a writer cannot proofread his own work, an artist can’t “proofread” her own painting.

Trail Guy and Mrs. Cowboy were on hand to discuss various details of the mural and help me get it to the best it could be. We added textures, messed with shapes, fiddled a bit with colors.

And just for fun, notice how the shadow cast by the tarp has moved throughout the day.

I purposely made the colors brighter than real life. This is because the mural faces East and will fade in the strong morning sun. Morning sun isn’t as damaging as afternoon sun or even as bad as all day winter sun, but it does suck out all the yellows first. This means the greens will turn bluish, and the grays will go to lavender.

After 13-1/2 hours over two days, this was our Mineral King mural. No longer was a fast horse necessary for optimal viewing, although a neighbor did ride up partway through the process.

Wow. Looks like someone successfully photoshopped a Mineral King photograph onto a door.

Nope. I painted that in 13-1/2 hours! (Imagine the sound of an arm breaking from patting oneself on the back. . .)

Why estimate hours when it is thank you gift? Because all murals are practice for me, and if I am getting paid, I need to be able to successfully estimate the time it will take. I’d say that was a mighty fine guess! (an “educated guess”, based on experience)

It needs 3 more things: a title, a hidden item, and a bear. Later. Now I have to go earn some money!

The Cabins of Wilsonia Book Signing, Saturday, April 4, 3-7 p.m., Three Rivers Historical Museum

This mural is about 6-1/2 feet high and 5-1/2 feet wide. It is a joy to paint a mural that requires no scaffolding or ladders. It speeds things up a bit to be able to simply step back and see how things look.

Please appreciate the shade, supplied by the handy and innovative Trail Guy. I certainly did!

You can see things look a little rough and short on detail. Gotta start somewhere! (In drawing, I call this “drawing the dog before the fleas”.)

I brought along a jar of a teal color, simply because it happens to be the favorite color of both Mrs. Cowboy and me. We were both just thrilled to see it would be very helpful to do the water!

After getting the entire surface covered, I returned to the sky for the second coat. With the heat, it was dry and ready to repaint. Since I had only 2 days to do this mural from start to finish and had estimated 14 hours, there was no knocking off for the day when I simply felt like quitting.

Mrs. Cowboy requested some clouds, so I pulled some out of my memory as I was recoating the sky. I figured we could either refine them together or I could just paint them out entirely.

And thus we conclude the retelling of Day One of painting of a Mineral King mural in 2 days. It’s looking pretty good, especially if you are on the back of a fast horse.

A year passed since Mrs. Cowboy Bert and I decided what to paint on the side of her house. Life (and sad to report, also death) happened, so I just waited until she was ready to proceed. I wasn’t bored, but thanks for your concern.

I showed up around 11 a.m. on a Thursday and was in my terrible painting clothes ready to hit the wall by noon. Trouble is, it was really really bright and sunny, a difficult situation for painting.

This was not a problem, because Trail Guy was with me and all prepared to Okie-rig up some shade. (Apologies to my friends from Oklahoma. . . is there a better expression to describe this?)

I drew it on the canvas (a roll-up door so a forklift can off-load bags of pellets for the stove) as close to the sketch as possible. Before I began painting, I masked the edges, which are some sort of a rubber gasket around the door.

Next, I painted in the sky using a color that I had already mixed for skies.

Does this look like Mineral King and Farewell Gap to you?

I cleaned my brush off on the stream area, because I could tell that it would take 2 coats of paint to cover this door material. It was some sort of baked-on white paint atop metal. Might as well use the color on the brush to begin covering the surface as well as getting as much out of the bristles and ferrule as possible (that is the metal section on a brush that holds the bristles to the handle.)

Maybe this 2 day painting project can be stretched out into a week of blog posts!

Will that make you excited for tomorrow?

This mural was painted as a thank you for my friend Cowboy Bert, who built a handrail for the steps up to my studio.

Last year we began discussing it, and I posted it on the blog in March. However, when my website broke, lots of photos disappeared, so you don’t get a link here to go back and see.

I first looked through Mrs. Cowboy Bert’s photos. We talked a lot. That’s what we do. This time it was about ideas.

Then I did a bit of photoshopping to get the idea ball rolling. Here are a couple of the things we tried:

(I’m not that good at Photoshop. Just be polite, okay?)

Then, we conversed some more. Mrs. Cowboy told me more about her vision, which developed with time and talk. It resulted in this sketch, which she whole-heartedly approved.

Good thing she knows that I can draw and paint, because otherwise, this might have been a bit too sketchy for her. (Ever wonder where the word “sketchy” came from? Now you know!)

That is Farewell Gap which is in Mineral King. Are you surprised??