Mural Collaboration - Texas Children's Hospital

I was asked to join in a collaboration project, one in which we all would be painting various images. To benefit the new TexasChildren’s Hospital in The Woodlands, expected to open in 2017. So yeah, during a brief gathering of some fellow artist and the spear head, Vickie McMillan, I was persuaded that I was capable of doing this.

Yes I say persuaded, I mean like many artist I’m not always sure that I can paint something. . . really me paint a real flower or a butterfly! My cohorts from Conroe Art League were all pretty sure and jumped at the chance. I lingered, maybe it was my need to be boosted up, you know make myself the center of attention and I’m not saying it wasn’t. But a bit of influence was needed for me to say Okay, I’ll give it a try. Vickie assured me us that if anything needed tweaking she would handle it. In fact we should more or less expect it as this is what would bring cohesion to the piece, whose parts were being painted by professional artist and children alike.

We were to choose an image from a group she had for us of native Texas plants, birds and butterflies. We were to paint using acrylics, in a very basic style – no details, no background. She would scan our painted image, digitally size and perhaps add a paint stroke or enhance the colors and then stich the images together into a 65 foot mural. This mural would be not only for beauty, but to help distract ill children from pains and such during long stays at the hospital or physical therapy. Within the woodsey / fieldy nature scene there would be hidden objects, a sort of I spy or seek and find, to have things like balls or see-saws or other playground images.

Our canvas to use was a plastic wallpaper of sorts . . . highly textured, the background was to remain white and depending the size of the piece you chose you could fit one, two or even three of the same image on it. I picked two different butterflies, I mean why not I had not painted one before – A C K – what was I thinking! Oh you want to see, here is the video.

  

Mexican Bluewing

Pipevine Swallowtail

Now mind you during the filming I had a few issues, not just staying in camera frame but while actually filming my laptop decided it was time to install windows 10, NO MATTER how many times I had said no before, it was going to install. So after the 3-4 hour installation, I moved my lap top into the house . . . my power cord that had been love bitten over a year ago, that I had fixed and then Johnny had fixed more better decided that it had had enough . . . it broke completely in two. And nonetheless it’s all working again, thank God.

Participating artist are to invited to the opening / unveiling of the mural and {cross fingers} I’ll be there and more crossing of fingers I’ll do a post about that and remember to come back to add that link here. And without further ado

Happy Art’ing Y’all