Murals And Family

One of the perks of coming from a large family is that there is a multitude of talents at your disposal... diamonds in the rough, so to speak. The past year my wife and I have been working on a lot of changes to our house. We spent months converting my office into a home theater, we created a recreation/school room and swapped the kids room.

We had trouble figuring out what to do with our daughter's room, so we asked my niece Laura, a UF grad and interior designer, if she could throw something together. The end result was using a lot of dynamic colors and streamlined furniture to give the room life and space.

In my son's room, I decided I wanted to do something unique so I came up with the idea of painting a mural. I'm not a painter, per se, but I thought I'd give it a shot. If it didn't turn out well, then we could always just paint over it. Since my son is a sports nut I used some local sports figures to create the following picture.

I then printed the picture onto a transparency and projected it onto the wall. I outlined the picture, including separation of shades, etc. The wall remained in this state for a while until we completed the home theater weeks ago. During the holidays my niece Catherine was visiting with her sisters, Merrill and Laura, the aforementioned designer. As they were seeing all of the changes to the house I asked Catherine, a tremendous artist, if she would wanted to paint the mural before she headed back to school. To my surprise and delight, she said yes.

So, she drove up and spent two straight days painting the wall... her work is so amazing. She could make a LOT of money doing this for others. Below are some pics of the progress.

The hardest part was getting the fabric right.
Catherine said "when you look at fabric,
you see a hundred different colors."
I replied... "I only see four. I'm glad you're doing this."

I helped out with the easy work. My motto... "Quantity over Quality."

Catherine painted for almost two straight days.
She says she's slow. I say she's good.

Catherine standing in front of the 99% finished mural.
My wife and I will finish the banner.

The best part of the experience, however, was just spending time with Catherine. She is such a strong, quiet person who is very caring and extremely talented. We spent hours painting and talking... it was a lot of fun. My wife and I will finish up the banner at the top of the painting this weekend and we're finding out what we could apply over the top of the painting to protect it from damage. The overall result is far better than I ever could have achieved or imagined.

Thanks Catherine!