Once upon a time there was a very boring wall in the downtown of the little community I call home. This wall was a high priority for those who lived in the community to make more interesting, but it took quite some time for us to get the permission of the owner of the wall. While we were waiting for permission from the building owner we designed a mural for the space that needed to do a few things: it needed to fit in our community of historic brick buildings, it needed to use the recommended Historic Downtown Association color palette, it needed to highlight something about our community, and finally, it needed to leave space for a smaller rotating art piece that people could take photos with.
The design approved by the Art Committee is a compilation of books, all written by local authors about the history of our area. The colors of the book spines are some of the colors in the historic color palette, and the open book in the center of the design created a space to both include a rotational photo op, and acknowledge all those who contributed to the project.
When the owner of the wall signed off on the project we had a local construction company do some light sanding and spray a coat of primer. The boards were still quite rough, but considering the scale of the project we were confident we could work with that. The wall measures about 16 feet high by 34 feet wide.
Over the course of 3 days, with 2 additional volunteers and a donated scissor lift we completed the main parts of the mural. Final touches and adjustments were made in the following days to improve legibility of the book titles and the spacing of the script on the open book, resulting in a final project that took around 60 hours to produce and a mural our community has really appreciated!
