What Inspires You To Do Mural Painting?
My grandfather was a very talented painter and he had painted this mural that hung over my grandparent's couch for as long as I can remember. It was a mural painting about the goings on in a monastery kitchen and dining room area with monks seated at a table eating and one monk that had fallen with what looked like a crate of strawberry jam that had spilled everywhere. I don't know whatever happened to that mural painting but I know I studied it and other mural paintings and I had drawn some conclusions about mural painting as an art form and what you need to be successful with it.
The first element of a good mural painting is a scene of some sort. You need something going on other than just the panorama of a countryside or something. One mural painting I had seen was when they had opened a canal in my hometown and they painted this enormous mural painting that was basically people and what they were doing when the first barge went down the canal but none of the activities were spectacular at all but the mural painting itself was. So choose an event or some scene that you want to immortalize and then start your painting from that point.
No One And Nothing In Particular
Another important element of a good mural painting is that there is no central character or scene. It is comprised of a huge amount of small scenes all set against the same background. Like the monks in the monastery where some were eating, some were cooking, and one had fallen down. The same goes for the enormous mural paintings you see that cover walls in cities. There are several things going on the one painting instead of one large event or it can be several small events that center around one large event but the large event is not present like the people at the canal opening. Just remember that there cannot be one main character and there has to be several characters in it.
Finally you need something, one or more of the scenes, to catch your eye. In the monk mural it was the monk falling down. He was the one element that people always keyed on and it made them want to look at the rest of the painting to see what else was going on. Draw them in with one little piece and dazzle them with the whole work.
