My latest project is my son's room. He is going to be a space cadet (kidding).
But no, seriously, his mural is going to be "trippin' out in outer space,"
that is to say, it's going to be a space mural.
I am still in the designing phase of this project. I originally wanted to go for a vintage-1960s-Space Ranger style, with stencil-like layers and bold shadows.
But whilst in the drafting process, I decided to go with a more whimsical approach, because what is space if not a place of wonder and enchantment and source of imagination. And endless color. And comics aren't really that colorful, and I was never really into them all that much anyway.
I am very excited about this mural; I LOVE painting on walls! Especially for my kids. My husband primed and painted (bless him!) and the room is ready to go. The color we picked (or rather, I picked) is Behr's Caribe; a deep blue with greenish hue. I chose it mainly because it matches the fabric of his bumpers (which is absolutely FABULOUS) and it seems like a lovely backdrop for an outer space setting.
One thing I have learned about murals is to use that base color. In the past I have painted on white walls, like the canvas of a painting, and simply had to fill every corner with color from my composition or find a way to "cut it off. " Or to put it another way; determine where the mural ends and the rest of the room's color continues. This can be an enjoyable challenge or a major pain in the neck.
Incorporating the base color into the composition enables me to have much more freedom in where to paint without feeling constricted to a setting. This seems pretty obvious, but did not occur to me until I painted a mural a couple of years ago for a children's room. The mother wanted a Princess and the Frog design, and before I started, she asked if it would be helpful if she painted hills on the walls. What she did was just divide the walls in half with a wavy horizontal line, then painted the top half blue and the bottom half green. This gave me a wonderful setting to create a small scene in the space she selected, without appearing to be "floating off into space."
So while Tristan's mural is staged to be in space, I do not want to fill every square inch of one wall with stars, planets and space ships (although that would be fun) but have the space envelope him, so that he feels he is walking into a painting, or is less aware of the mural and more of the environment I have created for him. So blue is a good place to start.
