Drawing on the Wall
Oft-times, when the four of us are pushed back from the table, enjoying the evening winding down, one of us will inquire, rhetorically, “I wonder what the sheet metal workers are doing tonight?”
For a younger crew, it would be a query in more-than-questionable taste. However, when you consider the 200-odd years of life pulled up around the table, the shading becomes more thankful than demeaning. Deprivation in postwar Europe, daybreak - and into the evening - stints running a restaurant, lonely watches in the bowels of an aircraft carrier, mind-numbing hours at a grinding wheel in a noisy factory – we have, collectively, “been there and done that.” We actually know what it is like to fall into bed at the end of a long day of hard, physical labor. We respect and appreciate the "daily grind" that is necessary to sustain the world in which we live. So, for us, the refrain “I wonder what the sheet metal workers are doing tonight?” is a grateful acknowledgment that, while no one knows what tomorrow may bring, for tonight at least, study and work and luck have combined to bring us to the easier lives that we enjoy and appreciate.
All of which is prologue to my assertion that drawing on the wall is part of the 'sheet metal work' of painting a mural. It is, in theory, not all that hard. You begin by taking the image to be transferred onto the wall and laying a grid over it. OK, that’s not difficult, especially for a Photoshop geek like me. The process involves digitizing the image that is to become the mural. Then you look at its dimensions in pixels, and compute the size of the squares you want to form the grid on the image. For us, the scanned image was 4000 pixels and the wall was 10 feet on a side. Nice numbers because that meant that if you constructed a grid of squares that were 400 pixels on a side, you would have squares that would correspond to 1 square foot of the final mural. So, again in Photoshop, you create a square that is 400 pixels on a side and save it as a “pattern.” You open the reference image, create a new layer and “fill” it with your pattern, which gives you your image with a grid, and Ta! Da! Here it is!
OK, so now I have this cool image in my computer but still have no answer to the question, “Have you begun to draw on the wall?” To move from digital space to the actual wall, it is essential that you create a grid to the wall. We did that with a large level and straight edges and T-squares of a variety of sizes. And that, of course, brings us back to the star-studded walls pictured in the last post. Once we had located the corner of each square, we stuck a star at the intersection. That gave us a foot square grid on the wall that corresponded to the image with the 400 pixel grid.
Still, you sense the problem do you not? One image is a picture on a 14” x 17” piece of paper. The "target" is a 10’ x 10’ blank wall with stars stuck on it. I'm looking for the twain to meet here, and the solution is not immediately obvious. I searched the wall in vain for an “insert image” button. Nothing. I searched Photoshop for a “paste image to wall” function. Again, nothing. It soon became clear that this was the point where I was supposed to “draw on the wall.” I called Paul.
“What should I use to draw on the wall?” I asked, deciding to stay with the basics.
“Do you have a kumquat?” he asked. Sometimes Paul’s rather quirky sense of humor is one of his most endearing characteristics. This was not one of those times.
“No, but I have a couple of avacados,” I replied. Two could play at quirky.
“Well, use those if you can’t find a pencil.”
“A regular pencil?”
“Yes, in lieu of fruit.”
Now, I know the general concept that lies behind the grid method of enlarging an image. You don’t draw the whole thing all at once; you do it a square at a time. Transferring the contents of the small square into the big square.
“So how do you replicate the little square in the big square?” I asked.
“You look at the little square, and sketch the stuff in the little square into the big square. I usually work with an area about the size of a card table top . . . .”
It should be clear by now that Paul and I are bringing very different skill sets to this project. I had no idea what he was talking about. It was as if I had said to him, who has never to my knowledge turned on a computer, “Take that picture on your easel, digitize it and upload it to the client.” We were talking different languages and I was obviously on my own. Back to Photoshop.
I decided to copy each section of the grid and turn it into a separate image. This, for example, is square 56:
Then you add a layer to the image and, using your graphics tablet, you trace the outlines of the major features of the square and note the color and shading characteristics, like this:
Finally you remove the actual image behind the tracing and you get an image that looks like a paint by numbers kit, like this:
So cool! But now I had to print the squares on 12 x 12 inch sheets of paper. Well, wander through your neighborhood art supply store and you will discover that this is not a standard size. You have to go to 14x17 to get 12 inches on a side, and then you cut the rest away. There were 100 squares – I figured my paper cost at about 2.5 million dollars.
However, in the garage we had several stacks of blank newsprint left over from packing when we made our escape from the loft. I discovered that a little work with a large T-square, a metal straight edge, and my trusty Excel knife would yield 4 12x12 sheets from a single sheet of newsprint. More amazing was the fact that the rather flimsy paper would feed through my Canon i9900 printer.
This is probably a good time to mention that it is always a bad idea to think about how much effort and time will go into any large creative project. Focus on the fun and the long-range goal, and the actual number of lines you have to trace, draw, and incise, will fade from terrifying to a minor inconvenience.
So, following that process of selective 'effort denial", not too many hours later I was able to tape images up on the first wall, matching the squares on the grid image with their appropriate “star corners” on the wall. When you do that you get a “hanging paper” version of part of the mural, like this:
The next step is to gently lift each paper square and mark, with a kumquat, avocado or pencil, the points where lines meet the edges of the squares. With those "anchor points" it actually does become possible, using the time-honored "peek and sketch" method, to put the content of the enlarged small squares on the paper, into their corresponding large squares marked on the wall. It looks like this:
I have done that to a large portion of the first wall. Tomorrow, Paul arrives with paint, brushes, etc., to inspect my work and begin putting paint on the wall. Fingers crossed!
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