Easthampton Mural (2008)

THE UNVEILING: A surprising amount of people showed up. Cool! Ice cream and cake! Cool! Check out that plaque! A few more photos on Flickr, . A few more photos on the ECA blog.

PAINTING DAY (June 1): Gosh dang I'm tired. Awesome crew of friends - Matt Dube, Barry Daggett, Sturgis Cunningham, Sarah Smith, Nate Duval, Mister Reusch, Kendra McDade, and Katherine. I can't believe we got so much done in one day. I say again: Gosh Dang. Super-special thanks to Casey & Dave at Manchester Rental for all of their scaffolding hauling and help. Way more photos on Flickr, .

SKETCH DAYS (May 29th & 30th): Sketching took hours. Hours and lots of math. Lots of little tricks and shortcuts I was suddenly recalling from my high school freshman drafting class, back when they still taught kids on Vemco locking ruler arms. Lots of string. Lots of mistakes. I ground down 1.5 pencils and ruined 8 or 9 old Sharpies. Worked half a day on Thursday and all day Friday and still didn't get to some of the tippity-top of the design, but on the upside we did start painting the low stuff. As you can see, the wall is so large, it even makes a Ford Festiva look small. Crazy!

COLOR TEST (May 27th, 2008): Workin' it out on a hunk of sheetrock. Lots of trips to Florence Paint to buy them lil' sample jars. Getting that tan/beige color turned out to be a big pain in my butt. Benjy Moore, ya'all!

PROPOSAL (late '07): This is my proposal mockup image, bodged together in Photoshop over a photo provided by ECA. It proved to be a distorted perspective photo, so there were certain things that needed changing when paint finally started hitting the wall.

SKETCH (late '07): Here's my initial sketch. Sharpie pens over a bad copy of the above photo because my printer was running out of ink.