Of the (many) enjoyable parts of painting murals – one of my favorites is the “custom” part! This was the case with my recent project of doing an 18-foot wide full-wall mural for a master bedroom in Brookline, MA.

My clients Sheri and Michael liked the aesthetic of my mural work and wanted me to incorporate this with a winter landscape at sunset. They wanted the color scheme to be a soothing palette of greys and blues to go with the light grey/blue they painted the walls – but they wanted a splash of color created by the sunset to give the piece some “pop” in the room. They had some photographs they liked to give me a general feel – but they left it up to me to create the final design.

With this in mind, I was off to create my concept painting. I first used the base color – Benjamin Moore “Silvery Moon” to choose similar colors to create subtle, quiet transitions and blends for the background and foreground. For the sunset, I wanted to create the “pop” my clients were looking for, but I also wanted to choose a color that was not too bright/saturated or dark to help it work with the rest of the composition. For this, I settled on”Del Ray Peach”.

For the design, I liked the idea of putting the viewer IN the scene as opposed to looking out at it, so I chose to bring the trees right up to the foreground in “into” the bedroom.As always, I did the concept painting to scale and used the actual paint I proposed to use for the mural to give an accurate look at what the final product would be.With this in hand, I met with Sheri and Michael who were happy with the design (photo below)– so I was on to the mural painting

Since this mural has so much blending of colors for soft transitions in the sky and the “fog” in the distant mountains and trees – I did all of this first. Painting the background before I did the trees allowed me to focus on getting consistent, soft blends without worrying about the edges of the trees. With the background done, I then drew the trees over the top of this and moved on to painting first the darker, more distant trees and then finally the birches up front.

The final result gave us the drama, but also the quiet beauty we were looking for!

Here are some shots of the progress – leading up to the final result.

Enjoy!

Jason