How to make a mural/part 3: assembling the team and prepping the wall

The ArtWorks program kicked off like it does every year, at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Apprentices, Teaching Artists, and ArtWorks supporters came from all over the great city of Cincinnati to meet each other and learn about the 2010 summer project lineup. I met my Teaching Artist and 5 great teenagers who would make up my team of Apprentices. We took the famous ArtWorks group shot, then all parties were dismissed.

(This is the 2009 crew, not 2010, but you get the idea)

I met the team at our mural site one week later – for the real start of our project.  Our group was small – 7 total, including myself, Annie (my Junior Teacher) Erika (18), Ke’Monte (17), Sydney (14), Chad (15) and Emily (17).  Here we are, as often seen in our studio.

I showed them the wall, we toured the studio, played some getting to know you games, and when all of that took only 15 minutes, we decided to go ahead and just start the mural. I took a picture of the team getting their safety gear on for the first time. It was an exciting moment for all!

(Sunscreen, yall!)

Prepping a mural surface starts with some heavy-duty wall cleaning.  That day we started with the first step of any mural – giving the wall a dry scrub with some wire brushes and all the vim and vigor we had. This is to knock off any loose paint and grit that might be hanging around on the surface.

On day two of our project  we were ready start the next phase of wall cleaning – “TSPing” – aka scrubbing the wall with chemicals. TSP (Tri Sodium Phosphate) is pretty harsh on the skin and can cause nasty chemical burns, so we used all the safety precautions we could think of; goggles dustmasks, gloves, long sleeves and pants and so on. Below is a pretty accurate portrayal of how we all looked that day. After the solution is mixed and scrubbed onto the wall, it is power-washed off.

Now you have yourself a clean surface, ready for priming. My team was excited to start painting on day 3. We got out our rollers, poured our enormous 5-gallon buckets of Nova Color primer into trays and got to work.

(Top: Erika  Bottom: Ke’Monte and Chad)

I gotta tell you, as mural surfaces go- you can’t get much better than ours.  Smooth like buttah. You might notice the panels on the wall.  A lot of people are curious to know if we put those panels up just for our mural. Luckily, the wall had been like that for years. Once upon a time, a building used to occupy the space where the parking lot now is on 12th and Jackson.  This building was demolished and interior brick was exposed on the backside of the Germainia building. Interior brick, unlike exterior brick, doesn’t hold up well againt the elements. These concrete panels were placed on the bottom portion of the building to protect those bricks. Lucky for us it happens to be a gorgeous surface for a mural.

It is unusual and pretty rare to have a surface like this to paint a mural on. I think all of my fellow Project Managers this summer were painting on brick walls- and this is the norm.  When you paint on bricks, you have to take special care to fill in each and every nook and cranny (like english muffins) of the mortar between each brick. This is a painstaking process. There is a term in the mural-painting world when your paint misses the deeper surfaces of brick walls -”holidays”. I am still not sure if this term is used as a noun or verb. Or if it is spelled that way. Either way, it kind of sounds like the opposite of what it is.

(This is not our wall. Whoever painted this had no holidays… or took no holidays? not sure)

Here is our wall, with 2 fresh coats of primer. Bling!

It was this same week, as we were cleaning and priming the wall, that I was coming home every night to wrap up my rough draft ideas for our clients. On the day that my team was TSPing their hearts out, I presented the Kellys their three options. There was one they decided on almost immediately, which spoke to them (and even made them giggle a little) more than the others.

And the winner was…

The “Rainbow-Ice-Cream- Heart-shaped-sunglasses” one! Later to be called Ice Cream Daydream. I was ecstatic.  When my team came in for lunch, I showed them what we were about to create. They were more excited than I was.

And this is when it really got interesting…

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