One of the things that has had me messed up these last few months has closed this Friday.
Some friends are going to open a bar on Valverde Street in Madrid and they asked me to draw a picture on a wall.
After working on different ideas, we came up with a final image and drawing. The wall is, I don’t know what the correct term is, but one of those that are left with a lot of roughness, as if without finishing and that are very cool (never better said, because of the cool).
All that was left was to finish it off the wall. With the final approach, in which the bodies have no color base and the loose lines go on the wall “face to face” (I think this is the term), there was a difficulty that scared me quite a bit. There would be no room for correction. I couldn’t use the color of the background to cover up any mistakes, drops, or unforeseen events that might come out. So it was time to go with the lesson well learned. I made a lot of sketches of the elements separately and generated an image that would be definitive.
It’s true that it’s the first thing they teach you. Grid a drawing. I’ve always found it a horrible thing to apply math to a drawing and dissect an image to copy it, but in this kind of case it’s very useful.
Already on the wall, not really sure where to start. I marked the intersection points of the grid with painter’s tape. It turned out to be the exact same color as the wall, so with a pen I put X on top of the papers. This allows you to detach and glue and peel off the papers without staining the wall. Using the same method, I glued papers all over the wall, longer and longer and painted over them, until the lines of the drawing were fitted and marked.
Then
John came. After looking at the framing with him, he came up with the idea of erasing the pencil on the wall with eraser… And that was a tremendous peace of mind. We began to replace paper with pencils until we had the figure completely defined.
The cool one was the hardest. But in the end we managed to have a fully satisfactory fit.
The next morning came the moment of truth.
We had to get freshness of strokes, see how the paint behaved,.. etc…
I started with the area that was least visible and the result was this:
and the final image….
