I use the term "painting" loosely - it's actually more "battling with the elements". As usual whenever I'm commissioned to paint a mural outside, it has rained continuously. Over the course of ten days, only two have been sunny. The rest of the time I've been dodging cloudbursts, and, on one particularly memorable afternoon, thunder and lightning. When I set out to be an artist, I never considered it to be a particularly dangerous career.
This is a slightly unusual and interesting commission for me. The school have asked me to reproduce 20 paintings by a group of Year 6 pupils which all depict the London skyline, scaling up from the A5 size paintings onto wooden boards approx 2m x 1m.
Every one of the 20 paintings is in a completely different style, and the challenge for me is to try and copy someone else's work yet at the same time create an overall uniform look to the mural.
Inbetween rainfalls I have managed to add some paint to about half the wooden panels in the playground fence. Here's some photos at halfway stage.
I suggest listening to this while you browse (it's what I was humming to myself while I was painting in the rain):
Some of the paintings by Year 6.
Deciding on the line-up.
Day One. The wooden panels ready for painting.
Drawing a design onto a panel.
Starting with the background colour. As the sky is a completely different colour in every painting, we decideded to choose one blue colour for the entire mural.
Day Two. Rained off...
Back to work - attempting to reproduce an A5 watercolour painting, with acrylic on a large wooden board.
