The Difficult Day

Today was the difficult day. I'm sure there is always a difficult day in a process like this. I'm sure if the process were longer there would be more difficult days, and I'm hoping that this was the only one (as I only have two more days).

Remember my Goal Wall plan? With the contact paper stencil? Well, I should have planned more thoroughly and invested in a proper knife, because cutting with a pocket knife just doesn't do it. Obviously, the lines I made were jagged, although they looked straight to the naked eye. And obviously, I didn't have too much time to test it out, so I just threw it on the wall with no research or testing. This means it didn't go exactly as planned.

Well, the stencil worked. It came out legibly. But it was very splotchy and the lines were all jagged and bumpy. I spent two hours fixing it. And because I'm not especially good at making straight lines by hand (hence the stencil idea), I ended up with straighter but still kind of bumpy lines. Not jagged, just not as perfect as I'd want them to be. So I put in some shading, which helps make the lines look straighter, and did some really subtle things with the paint to help make everything pop a little more and look nicer. This is the result:



Not bad. Closer up:



The last "L" in particular was the worst. I couldn't position the ladder correctly (there were lots of heavy boxes right under where I needed to work), so I was stretching pretty far, plus that was where the stencil was especially bad, so I was trying to cover up a ton of splotches.

However, it looks fine from a distance, and unless you are really inspecting it, you won't notice that it's a little imperfect. And anyway, they wanted me to paint the letters on. They could have easily bought letters that you rub onto the wall, or made a banner on the computer. But instead they wanted me to hand-paint it on, so you get the human-touch, right? Right?

So, spending two hours on something I'd spend 45 minutes on kind of put me in a bad mood. Not a bad mood but not a good mood. I started working on the buildings again, but I was getting frustrated, and I was tired and my feet and back hurt from standing and stretching on the ladder for the "Goal Wall." Despite all of this, I was able to finish the building on the back column and the building on the front of the front column:





Tomorrow I am hoping to be there all day. I wasn't there all day today because I was taking pictures of my other work for my portfolio that I need to put together for grad school. Oops, I have a life outside of the mural?

My goals for tomorrow: Finish both pink-based buildings. The back of the back column and the front of the middle column. If I have time, I'll finish the entire middle column, including the back. Thursday I will do both green buildings (or one, if I do one tomorrow) and the sky on all of the columns, and then I am done, done, done.

It feels like it's been a long time, doesn't it? Maybe because I post three times a day.