Got to work on Ari's mural this last weekend. I'll have to take new pictures in the daylight. The process is to paint over the chalk, wash the chalk off, then touch up the lines where the paint washed off too. This makes for lots of bouncing around while stuff dries. I also found I had to go back and forth between working high and low. Painting the high stuff is really hard on my neck so if I keep moving around my neck gets a needed break.

I have no idea when I'm going to get another block of time to work on it. Working with the kids around has been tough. Maddie gets into everything on the table and I'm waiting to turn around and find her painting on the walls. Ari likes to stand up and hang off my legs which makes it really hard to move around. I've set up other things for them to do while I work and that lasts maybe 10 min before I have to break up a fight and hook them into something else. Today, I am going to set up some cartoons to run while I'm working. We can all watch Curious George or Tinkerbell while I work.

[Edited to add photos]

Husband and the girls are off to the zoo for the day. I get the house to myself to work on the mural uninterrupted. Yay!  I already got up early and started working on it and I have high hopes for lots of progress today. I must remember not to dunk my paint brush into my coffee cup. Probably should keep the water bowl and coffee cup at opposite ends of the table.

There! Now I am committed. The first paint on the walls commits Cetus the Whales to the mural.

I'm itching to start painting all the drawings in Arianna's room but I'm not completely finished with the sketches. My preference in painting is to put something up and then revise over and over again until I get something I finally like. It usually begins with light marks with a pencil, revision with a light colored paint, revision with a med color paint, revision with a dark paint and then start painting it in with some of the color. Then I keep fussing with it until I'm forced to move on. The process is very undisciplined and non-committal. I've had more than one art teacher over the years comment on it, wanting me to be a little bit more certain in my application.

Once I put paint on the wall in Ari's room I can't really fix it. I can do minor touch ups, but he walls are a painted texture and I don't think I have the colors any more. So it is really important that I have the majority of the editing done before I paint. I've set asside most of today to work on it, so we'll see what happens. I'm making myself finish all the character drawings first before opening a paint can.

Anyway, that's where I'm at on the mural in case y'all were wondering.

Wall sketches of Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, and Hercules. I was starting to get tired late that night so drawings got more sloppy. I'll have to go back and fix them.

Some of the constellations have stories about how they relate to each other and I wanted the images to be like an illustration of those stories. I also made some changes to the traditional interpretation of how those images are represented in relation to the placement of the stars. For example, Ursa Minor is usually drawn as a bear with a very long tail. I've never understood that look and found if I drew the bear cub sitting with it's nose pointed up, it would match the shape of the stars and not have a ridiculous tail. I also positioned the bears much closer together than they appear in the night sky, but did make Draco's tail curve between them to represent that another constellation does in fact separate them.

The story of Hercules' constellation is that he slayed Draco in order to take the golden apples. In the night sky, Hercules' is facing away from Draco. Again, I wanted these two characters to relate to each other so I flipped Hercules to be facing Draco so that it looked like they are interacting with each other.