OUIL603 Extended Practice - Thought Bubble #Getintocomics, Part 4

Here's a work in progress picture! 

I approached painting this the way i've done murals in the past; first I compiled the best of my initial ideas into a 'board' (basically an A4 printout, which you can see on the left). Then - I got an A2 sheet of paper and plotted out how everything was going to be laid out on the ply board. I enlarged the sketch onto the board with a marker - then I started blocking out all the colours with a base layer of acrylic paint. 

This is what the front board looks like painted! I painted the base colours in first, then the details (which you can see on the tree) and then 'inked' the lines over the top with more black acrylic paint. 

One of the nice things about acrylic paint is that you can paint over your sketch lines, and any mistakes you make. It's (mostly) waterproof (though it will peel if it's not properly sealed) - which makes the boxes suitable to be outside. Me and Tom had a bit of a nightmare with his other boxes due to some dodgy emulsion that went chalky in the rain - so the bases in this one and all the other boxes were acrylic-painted as well. 

The downside to painting just with acrylic and not with something like spray paint, is that it can be a mind-numbingly slow process. The act of just putting in the base colours took me almost 10 hours on the front, because some layers needed multiple coats to become properly opaque. 

The other thing of note: the type wasn't added until later, and was chosen by Tom. The type was added actually with a hand-made stencil - using an enlarged photocopy sheet. Whilst I don't think id've used the type that he did - we were very short on time by this point and it just needed to be done. The technique was still pretty clever, and one that i'll remember for the future!

 

The last WIP shot, with the backing board - assembled on it's frame. Thor's Hammer is so heavy. 

In total from start to finish, this is probably about 15 hours of work, spread over about a month. When I wasn't in the studio, we were touring the boxes round various locations in leeds as part of an agreement with Leeds Inspired, turning this into a very significant brief. The overall crafting side of making it though was very, very fun and it reminded me how much I miss doing large-scale pieces of work!