More from Garin Baker on mural painting

Here is another post written by Garin Baker about the process of creating a big mural. Thanks Garin for all your efforts to show us this and explain it.

Amazing site along the banks of the Hudson River about 60 miles north of New York City Is where the fun all happened.

We started with the faux stone work accomplished in a fast and amazingly easy technique.
A turpentine wash of what ever color you pick on you palette mixed with it complimentary color varying the degrees of warm and cool temperature is applied to an area a wide as you can reach
from left to right from top to bottom letting the paint run down creating basically an abstraction of mess and drips. Just a bit of time for the turpentine to evaporate and just the pigment is left for you to work into making sure not to over brush it. Then cut in with a gray to white mortar lines varying you brush thickness. Think organic shapes working you negative space to create interesting stone and rock shapes. Lay in some deep cool shadows on the bottom of the stones as they appear and some high lights and variate some middle tones on top... play play play. keep it loose, and keep moving.


Wonderful Nancy Stonecypher muralist and faux finisher picked up the technique in no time flat Awesome!

Natalia Zadnovskia expressionist and theatre designer artist from Russia via Brooklyn, mastered the technique and could compete a 20 ft square section every day. Amazing to watch her.


At night we used a digital projector and lap top with our previously completed compositionally approved designs and projected the archway areas onto the wall, measured and scaled so as to
not deviate from the overall schematic. One of my past students at School of Visual Arts In NYC whom is a colleague and amazing painter in his own right David Penna checks and lets us know all
systems are good.


Then we with a very thinned out turpentine tone drew out the projected image on the wall. No need to draw to much since were just trying to get accurate placement and defining where the large lights and shadows are located. Figures where drawn out by me since I was primarily responsible for their accuracy and needed to draw them out with just the right indications since everyone depicted
in the Mural is from Newburgh and it was important that they would recognize themselves.



Young paid apprentice Artist Bryan Gugllielmi proved invaluable on this project and I could not have completed it without him.
He was my primary blocker in and lead me from left to right blocking in large masses of freehand mixed colors as I followed tightening and resolving
the form and accuracy. He's been painting from life in my studio since he was sixteen when his mother brought him by saying he was getting into trouble
at school and needed some direction. Bryan is now a muralist with Mural Arts in Philadelphia as well as working on his own paintings after completing his degree
a few years ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Palette.