Southeast Whitesburg Mural--11 Laying foundations

We have a guest photographer today: Chris Jones who handles public relations for the college, came over from the main campus to get some actions shots of me up on the scaffolding. I actually am painting while Chris snapped photos (working on a tree), but we had to do a little "posing" so he could get both my face and the image on the wall.

The photo to the right is cropped from my favorite. What is not apparent in the picture is all the paint smeared on the legs of these overalls -- I tend to use them to wipe brushes dry when a rag or paper towel is not handy.


The foundations referred to in today's title are the background coats on various parts of buildings that I began laying in today. In Chris's photo (above) (and in mine at the bottom of the page) you can see the Allied Health building where I painted a rosy cream color (Unbleached Titanium, Titanium White, and tiny amounts of Cadmium Red and Naphthol Crimson) to suggest the mortar between the bricks which will be painted later. In my photo to the left, you can see two different colors, a cream and a light gray, that have been applied to sections of the Administration/Coca-Cola Building.

The process begins by selecting the area to be painted and masking around it (to provide nice sharp architectural edges) with blue painters tape. Basically this amounts to sketching out the design with pieces of tape cut to length. A little tricky to get right. Working so close to the wall, I'm not always sure I have lines plumb. In this case I erred slightly on one edge, but it can be fixed easily when the adjoining, slightly darker wall is painted. After the foundation area is painted, the area has to dry completely, especially if it is necessary to mask over it to do an adjacent area. So I selected two, non-adjacent areas on the Coca-Cola building to paint today, and the entire front of the Allied Health building, and will allow them to dry overnight.

While those foundations dried, I went back to working on trees, laying in two additional large trees. Also, I added in the base color for the river that runs between the two parts of the campus, detailed areas where light reflects on the river will be added later. Leaves for the trees will be added after the branches are dry.

It felt like I spent a lot of time today, getting down off the scaffolding, to get a wider perspective on what I was doing, and making notes of what to work on tomorrow.