Painting:

To paint the mural I decided to use the spray gun as this creates a really nice finish. I like how it is easy to blend once colour with another and create a light air like texture as the colour slowly fades. I used the gun an a setting with lower air pressure so it makes a speckled, dotted mark which is an affect I like as I think a solid colour would have been too strong. Also a more broken finish means it is easier to blend in more than one colour and it also hides any mistakes that might occur like drips or too much paint. This techniques also allows you to put colour on really quickly so the majority of the sprayed areas were completed in one day. Similarly to the sample I used four blue tone, three green and a black and white. All the paint was watered down and mixed with some glaze, which will aid in protecting the painting once it is finished and also helps the layers of paint cover better. Before spraying I also filtered all the paint through a tea strainer to remove any lumps of debris that could block the gun. The only problem I had was with the added texture I made using the flexbond as the paint held to it differently to the polyfiller that I used on the sample. This created some odd patchiness that did not work. To overcome this I painted the lighter patches with the mid tone blue and then re-sprayed it with the darker blue, this helped them all blend together better. I painted all three section of the mural at the same time so that I could work across them all and make sure that all the parts that overlapped sections were painted the same. With all the spraying complete I removed all the masking and the began painting over any imperfections and painting in the white sections. This took some time as I was anxious to make sure all the lines were straight and as perfect as they could be. I then went back over some parts of the painting with the spray gun using white to blend back in some of the colour as the roller I used to paint in the white had left some streaky marks. There was also some difficulty working in the spray room as the extraction makes it quite windy so I found more of the paint was going on me than on the canvas, but perseverance is the solution to most problems.