Greetings from Charleston

It doesn't get better than traveling across the United States to paint murals for and about the places we've been. Today we're painting with Greetings Tour in Charleston, the capital city of West Virginia. We're tasked with painting a sternwheeler on the Kanawha River, the West Virginia Capital Building, and some details on a few local sights and faces.

As a good example of multidisciplinary painting, we used both Montana spray paint and Golden mural paints throughout this mural. In the letters R-L the cotton candy sky is painted completely with spray paint, while the Capital Building and Fred Torrey's sculpture of Abe Lincoln are painted with brush. We're told this is the most detailed scene ever painted in a Greetings Tour mural. The sternwheeler was also shown a high level of precision, and rendered mostly with spray paint. Note the soft gradient shadows. Look closely and you can see a few miniature-scaled figures on the deck of the boat. We'd be lying if we said we weren't trying to impress!

Although the look and feel of spray paint is unmatched and has a contemporary history, sometimes it's just as fun to paint with a brush. The trick is to get a good pounce on the wall, so you don't have to worry about the proportions getting out of order. The Capitol building ended up taking us a few days to finish, but we just couldn't stop! Watching a blank cinder block wall turn into life, stroke by stroke, is something like watching a sunset after a quiet but memorable day.