Mural Anatomy

Have you ever wanted to see the anatomy of a mural? I thought I would post the complete documentation of a new mural produced for Gusanos. This Chicago style pizzeria debuts in Fort Smith, Ark. in the coming months. The owner wanted visuals relating to Chicago or pizza or sports. Above all the design would add to the atmosphere of the restaurant. So this is the anatomy of a mural start to finish in photos.

Mural Meetings

After talking with the owner, I got some photos and measurements of the space and began the design process. The direction was pretty loose. I created four design ideas to find the point where everyone, including me, was happy. Sports, interesting type treatments, skyline, sepia were all at play. I gave a feature spot to Mr. Cub and hall of fame baseball player Ernie Banks swatting his 500th homer. Front and center, however, was a custom skyline font, almost art deco-esque to spell out the Windy City’s name.

Sweet Home Chicago

There are several Chicago references in the final design, some more obscure than others. Luckily, I had just taken my family for a week long vacation to Chicago so I had plenty of research photos.

Patience

This was one of my favorite, albeit, most tedious murals yet. It took around three and a half hours to complete each letter in the word Chicago. We had to tape, paint the one set of stripes, then carefully cut in the dark stripes. Check the video of this process at the end of the post. You’d think I was painting in slow motion. I had a good window of three days over the labor day weekend to execute the work. The construction workers and electricians would be out of the building allowing us to move freely about without disrupting anyone’s workflow. Plus we were able to use their scissor lifts! It was handy, even though one sounded like a dying elephant. It was on the verge of running out of juice the entire time.

Expert Help

Because time was so short, and the lettering was so intense, I brought a crew, all skillful artists themselves. Patrick, Cole, and Meggy, jumped in. And in short order we had the design drawn onto the wall and painted in. We projected on a Thursday night. Patrick and I started with the umpire and catcher for two hours on Friday morning. We knocked out the rest between Saturday evening and Monday by around 7 p.m. All told we painted and taped about 36 hours collectively for a total close to 120 man-hours.