Tonkawa - Transferring the Design and Color Studies

Checking the radar on Amber's computer, it looked like we'd have a three hour window of tornadoless weather (this is no joke - there seems to be a tornado or two in the vicinity at least once every day). Power for the LCD projector and laptop were drawn from a city utility box attached to Tonkawa's lone stoplight at Main & Grand. All we needed was for it to get dark. While we waited anxiously for the sun to slip below the horizon, people cruisng down Main Street slowed down, curious to try to figure out what was going on. Then finally, at around 8:30 with only an afterglow of twilight in the sky we turned on the projector...

With the help of a couple local tech wizards, a core group of steady handed painters, a dj, and a few cheerleaders the line design was transferred to the 124 foot wall using thinned down paint in a little over two hours.

photo by Ken Crowder

In what seemed like only a moment, eight inch tall hands from the mural design were transformed into ten foot tall hands on the wall, Max Carr's plane went from toy size to almost real plane size, and for the first time we got a glimpse of how the mural would look at full-scale.


Back in the studio at Northern Oklahoma College, Nicholas, Amber and I began translating our line design into a 3/4 inch = 1 foot color study collage made out of cut paper. Using cut paper instead of paint at this stage allows for quick changes in color and value, and because cutting and pasting doesn't favor small details, it forced us to focus on larger shapes within the overall composition as opposed to more superficial embellishments.