The Mural Process before the paint…
When you’re walking down the street or scrolling through Instagram you often see the finished product, a beautifully painted mural and perhaps the tag of the artist who painted. What many understand less about is the process before the paint, all that led up to the finished piece.
Salvador Dali Museum (Girona, Spain)
Every artist of every discipline, murals and beyond has their own creative processes. Famously, Surrealist artist Salvador Dali used the unusal technique of sleeping upright holding an object that would make a sound when dropped loud enough to wake him, allowing him to recall aspects of his dreams and use them in his creative process for his paintings. Obviously the creative process for creating a custom mural for a client differs greatly from this but there is a process nevertheless.
When painting custom murals there is an added layer to the creative process, that being what the client wants. For me when someone gets in touch with their ideas that’s when my creative process begins but before a consultation call I have to be careful to not make too many assumptions about what they might want. There is a balance to be found in forming my creative ideas and questions to be asked, I must not run away with any ideas at this stage. For me a consultation call and or a site visit is a time to really get to grips with what the client wants in terms of style, content, colours, size and complexity. A true understanding of this before anything else allows me to then adapt any early creative ideas I had to suit what the client wants, this gives me the perfect balance between my own creative ideas and the clients vision.
The next part of my process I will refer to as the ugly duckling stage, where I scribble down on a piece of paper my ideas and I’d be slightly embarrassed to show these to a client but it is a formative stage of the design. Although I may still change elements in the final design or even when I’m painting the mural (with agreement from the client), the general composition of the design is formed in my ugly little scribbles.
These ugly scribbles are then transformed into the final design either digitally on procreate or on paper. There’s no decisive method to choose between the two, it's just what feels right, though the benefit of designing digitally means more opportunity to try out ideas, compare and remove them in a timely manner. When designing, I usually take inspiration from real life and for reference I use photos I’ve taken myself. Botanical designs especially lend themselves to this because you just need to walk outside, go to the park or a garden centre, take some photos and then you’re set.
All of the photos above were taken from a visit to a tropical botanical garden, that one visit gave me reference material for many future designs. Design inspiration is all around you just have to look.
Sometimes providing the client with more than one design is necessary. This is for one of two reasons. One; the client is unsure on a specific element of the design, for example I could create two identical designs but with different colours schemes to see which they prefer. And two; the client has graciously given me a large amount of creative freedom so as to make sure the client is still has a degree of control with the project I give them a choice of design, which also allows me to be doubly creative.
Muralists may have similarities in their processes as many have the goal of pleasing the client with their design however every artist is different and will do what works best for them. The mural process before the paint is such an integral part of the the mural process so I hope this gives you a little insight. I’m sure I’ll go into more detail in future posts but hopefully this is enough to fill your appetite for mural talk for now.
