My wife and I are painting a six foot square mural to be placed in the old interurban train depot here in town. Needless to say, it is overwhelming and we have painted off the first sketch and redrawn it back on again. The rough look of what I am doing with the train wheels is just exactly that, rough sketch. I had to find how all these parts look and I really need to know how they work before I can draw. I even looked at my toy train set to see how the depicted them. The springs drawn above do look like sausages but I was just quickly placing shapes in to get a feel for size. We lay this board down on our counter and work on it and sometimes we stand it up. Della is doing the sky right now with it standing up. I am going to buy carpenter's tape before I move on with the trolley paint. We have a lot of various historic items to place on the dock in front of the trolley and that will be the last of our painting.
We are moving along slowly because of the size of it. My wife and I have painted many murals for our church promotions for missions so we work well together on it. We both know that paintings just develop and the quality comes from layers of paint and value study. We have more than this painted but it still is in the kindergarten stage so I will not show it to you. When I quit cringing when I look at it I know we are getting closer to the real thing.
Update today, June 9th, we just painted this over with gesso and we are going to start again for the third time. I found a resource photo that is closer to the photo of a trolley in our Woodward Centennial Book. It is a classy looking thing and I can see details of the actual trolley. I don't have to guess what is where and how big that it all is. Redrawing it on the board this evening.
