Recycling plastic lids and hummus containers are my favorite paint containers. The plastic lids from containers that mixed nuts or peanut butter are sold in make the best paint palettes. And they fit perfectly into empty hummus containers. I would use one plastic lid for each color set and then store them in the hummus containers. They would stay moist for a day or two until I could paint again. If they dried I could then scrape the lid and pull the old dry paint off (it peels off like plastic) and reuse the lid. Cheap and super handy!

One of my major concerns when paint the murals was to make the colors seem cohesive over the entire painting. I have the tendency to use color directly from the tube and that can make the images very jarring as one color clashes with another. A trick I picked up in art classes years ago is to use a base color that all other colors of the painting are mixed with. The color from the tubes are then treated as pigments, tinting the base color into various shades. With Madeline's mural I used two colors as a base, a beige and a turquoise. Arianna's mural used mostly a beige and just a little bit of a gray blue.

For Madeline's mural I created contact sheets of images that I used as inspiration. It was time consuming to collect the images from the web, compile them into pages, and then print them out. I tried collecting the images into to Flickr and Picasa and that too was time consuming requiring downloading and uploading images. I finally figured out creating a Pinterest board and then viewing the images with my tablet was the best option. Covering the screen of the tablet with cling wrap worked to protect the screen from paint.

During the painting process I discovered a trick that helped me work through some difficult parts. Whenever I found myself having to paint something that felt really challenging and stretched my skills outside of the comfort zone I would switch to painting with one of my smallest brushes. There was something about forcing me to make lots and lots of little marks that made the work look better. The little marks created more texture and forced me to make minute little details that can only be really seen up close. From a distance though they translated to highlights and shadows that overall made the painting look better. Changing brush sizes also made me change gears mentally; instead of trying to make the part fit into the whole painting perfectly, which became overwhelming, I just worked out that one little part. Once the fairy's face was working I could move on to making their body work. And then the wings, and then scenery around them, and so on.