Office Wall Art

Since the company i work for moved to a new building, i felt the walls were a little stark, in comparison of the old building, with the drafts in the walls and leaks from the ceiling, I thought to my self: Self we need something to remember the old shop by. Hence the picture you see above you.

starting with some thick poster board (got free, thanks Dan) i did a light pencil sketch and masked with frisket as little as possible. (to save on frisket mostly)

Thanks to Harbor Freight Tools, I've got plenty of old catalogs to use as masking material. Using some cut down masking tape (right down the center of the roll with an Exacto knife) I worked out the brick lines and such. I kicked my self in the ass when i realized i forgot to fill in the mortar color first before laying down the tape (oh well, just more masking to do). I generally like to build in colors starting with the lighter under tones, like I did for the rocks on the family room wall project. since most of the colors are fairly transparent, bottom colors will modify what i put over them.

here the cracks are starting to come together. I used small piece of card stock held in place to get the nice sharp lines

More coloring with gray overtones

before removing the tape I did make the airbrush splatter darker dots all over the bricks to get a texture look for later.

Sorry about the gloss, I haven't strayed any flattener over this yet. when the acrylics get too heavy they tend to get a gloss. anyway I've pulled all the mask off to work on the big X now.

Red is oddly hard to get to look "deep". some light shadowing was added and (not shown in this picture) I used some card stock to cut out a bio hazard template and laid it over the red "tape". Using transparent black in the Airbrush for the lettering and shadowing. clean out the brush again and using white to drop some light reflection.

not too bad, but not complete

remember those dark splatters I talked about earlier. using the smallest paint brush I have and white paint i add a small dot below every single splatter, this tricks the eye into thinking a divot exists. this gives the 'bricks' some more realistic texture.

after spraying over with a flattening paint the painting looks more solid and shows up on camera better.

there it is in my new office. my only complaint was that I wish I could have matched the paint in my office better.

The next Airbrush project will be a Steampunk clock, I'll post in a few weeks when finished.