Having recently refurbished the chimney pipes for his wood burner in preparation for winter, Terry asked me if I’d paint some cockerels for him in the alcove behind the stove.
Stenciling in there was a bit of a tight squeeze but they turned out rather well.
…roast chicken all winter!
Click here to see photos of my cockerels stenciled in other locations in my Signs and Murals gallery
I recently finished painting one of my plane tree patterns on a wall plastered with mud in my friends’ straw bale house.
Simple lines in white emulsion paint are very effective on the beautifully coloured and textured mud, which still has straw poking through it in some places
This is the digital version of the design, you can see its evolution here in one of my previous posts
About seven years ago I painted the mural below in the same house, also on a wall plastered with mud, it was then visible in the main living space.
They’ve since built the new internal mud plastered wall to create another room for their expanded family so the first mural is hidden inside the new bedroom.
I enjoyed the whole experience of painting in white on mud so much (and I’m also a bit vain and missed seeing my art work from the living room) so it was lucky that my friends happily agreed to my proposal to paint a mural on the new wall and we settled on a theme of leaves.
This is the bare mud wall
I made this plan for the mural in Photoshop, using the cut out, inverted line work of my original pattern
I then ‘Photoshopped’ it to the photograph of the bare wall to check on the layout before transferring the design to the wall
I started by projecting the image onto the wall and drawing the outline in white pencil but ran into technical difficulties with the electrical equipment. I had to resort to plan B which meant tracing the pattern using chalk on the reverse surface of a printed template and then penciling over the chalk lines, which was far more messy and time consuming but ultimately effective.
This is a detail of the pencil drawing
Here is the partially completed mural
and a head on view of the completed mural without the added domestic decoration
This was a really enjoyable project, completed in many short sessions over a period of several months, combined with delicious lunch visits to my lovely friends.
It also fulfilled my ambition to complete a painted version of one of my digitally designed patterns on a real life wall.
Another outing for my strutting friends, in another beautiful Vejer town house…lucky chaps.
Here´s a repeat of the cockerel image.
This time I applied the stencil twice to a door (acrylic paint)
This piece evolved from a little pencil sketch I made of a neighbour’s cockerel during an exercise for a distance learning illustration course.
I scaled up the sketch and used it to cut a stencil through which I applied acrylic paint to reclaimed wood. It still serves as a house sign for the home of the cockerel and his human companions.
This image is now available on postcards and as digital prints (A3 and A4) and I can stencil him onto almost any surface.
I was commissioned to design a sign for a house called La Casa del Sol, which could also be used as an image for business cards by a lovely lady who is a ’Lightworker’. She wanted a representation of the sun, sky and sea in the form of a mandala, painted in bright, positive colours.
Having researched the client’s ideas I made small preliminary sketches, developing the one which stood out as being particularly harmonious into a larger line drawing, which she approved. She also decided on the size and shape of the sign at this point and approved the colour samples I’d made.
I painted the sign on primed marine plywood in gloss paint, using several coats of varnish to make it weather proof and used a simplified version of the sign for the business cards. The client was delighted with the results.