The mural is finished!  It was a fascinating process, and being part of the neighborhood for a few weeks while passersby stopped to check out the progress was so cool.

It was sweet that the city of Tacoma had the wall prepped and painted our chosen blue color for us.  The only major obstacles were the late season, (which brought minimized hours of light and rainy weather), and the deep, deep recesses of the grout that had to be meticulously dabbed with small brushes to drive the color into them.  We certainly used the rough surfaces of the brick to our advantage, giving swaths of color a stipple effect in its gradation, but large sweeping motions across the wall had to be touched up into every grout cavity!  It was tedious, but the outcome was worth it….I can’t believe how well we masked how rough the wall was!

We had worked on a few iterations of the idea in our preliminaries, but only minimal color studies so we worked it out as we went along.  here are some of the original sketches:  

…millipedes, tires, blackberries, her setting was not set even as we started to apply paint to wall.  I am happy with the grass we chose though- the varying blades and swaths of color gave it more dimensionality and really tied together the floating community elders with the girl staring at the slug.

Jeremy was awesome to work with, we gave each other advice and truly respected each other’s opinions as we bounced ideas and techniques off each other all day. 

At first there was talk and then a date for a community “unveiling”.  Not knowing what to expect, I was shocked at how cool it was.  The wall was covered in a plastic curtain (!), the mayor showed up to speak, we were given framed appreciation certificates, and we painted our names on the bottom corner.  I was so happy to get a formal shout out of appreciation!  I am now hopelessly hooked on murals, and just large public art in general, and I really look forward to making more murals in the near future. 

Click here for an article from Tacoma Spaceworks