Early Childhood Education Center

I was asked by the director of a local Child Care center to paint a bright happy mural on an ugly cement wall that was next to the door the children used every day to enter and exit the playground of their building.  Here it is.

  

Before and After pictures:

Before

After

This was my first outdoor mural and my first attempt of painting on concrete.  It was a great learning experience to discover the challenges that both of those things create.  In the end, the director of the center and all the kids who attended were very happy with the outcome, as was I.

Chicken Pot Pie

This is in the home of a friend of mine whose kitchen had a farm and country theme with lots of chicken décor.

  

Pretty much everything in the painting including the rooster, the weathervane, the triangle dinner bell, the pot, the pie, and the chickens, was requested by her to match a piece of her existing décor.  She wanted to feel like she was looking out the window onto a chicken farm while she was working in the kitchen.

I was really happy with the way the fence turned out and love the detail of the blades of grass around the posts.

Cute baby chicks.

Daddy Rooster.

Every farm needs a weathervane

Dinner Time!

I don't love the way the pie turned out, but I like that you can see the steam rising from it as it cools in the window.  I wonder if that chicken is going to take the first bite :).

Here are some of the objects in the kitchen that the mural was based on:

Final before and after pictures

Before

After 

There was a window on the wall on the left and you can see light coming from it that I think should have resulted in a small shadow cast by the ledge. I didn't do the texture finish on the original wall however and I wasn't confident that I'd be able to restore the wall if the shadow didn't look realistic. I opted to not attempt it and just leave the painting as is without the shadow, but I kind of regret it.  If I could go back, I'd put it in as well as redo the pie completely.

Introducing Brighton Murals and its new logo!

Prior to painting the Dinosaur mural for my friend's home child care program, I would never in ten million years have thought that I was qualified to go around painting murals for people since I had very little experience and virtually no formal instruction.  However, having completed my first ever, full wall mural, and being happy with the results, my confidence took a boost.  It continued to go up  when several other people in the early childhood community learned about the dinosaur project, saw it, and liked.  Before I knew it, people were asking me what I charged and if I could paint for them.  I was stunned.  Charge?  That had never occurred to me before.  How much does stuff like that go for? 

The whole experience was very complimentary and put the idea in my head of perusing some additional projects.  I hadn't actually planned on painting murals as business until a professional contact that I knew from a previous job, and who was the director of a commercial child care center, asked if she could hire me to spruce up an ugly, plain wall at her center.  A paying gig?  Who could turn that down?  The center was affiliated with the local university and they would be hiring me as a contractor, but required that I be a legitimate, licensed business with my own liability coverage etc.  I don't remember now what all the hoops were I needed to go through to make it happen, but I decided to go for it and become an official business.  Before I could file as a business though, I needed a business name.

My first idea was Murals by Lisa, but it was already taken, not as a local business name, but by someone who owned the url at muralsbylisa.com.  I'm sad to say that that site doesn't work anymore because I quickly became her biggest fan.  The "murals by Lisa" were really good and I received a lot of inspiration and confidence from her paintings.  Although I really liked her I didn't want to be mistaken for her online and I wanted to have my own url that was uniquely mine (a friend of mine was going to create a website for me).  After a bunch of brainstorming and Google searching to find something that I felt wouldn't be confused with anyone else, I finally decided to branch out to my middle name, Brighton, and became "Brighton Murals."

I filed my business papers and started jumping hoops.

Next, I needed a logo.  This was a my first attempt at digital design.  I had learned some basics of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator from a job I had for 11 months at a print company (I was a project manager, not a designer), so my skills were novice, but good enough, and this is what I came up with:

My new business logo, (That paint brush was my first attempt at 100% completely digital drawing).

I'm proud to say, it's almost 10 years later, and I still like it.

Armed with my new logo, my new confidence, my branded licensed business including a website, business cards and a bunch of other official looking documents and agreements, I was ready to get painting!  My problem was I didn't exactly have anything to paint yet.

It would still be a few months before I was approved as a contractor at the child care center and all of the consultations were done and design proposals approved. So in the meantime, I decided to work on improving my skills by drawing everyday, creating a portfolio of ideas, and convincing a friend of mine to let me get some mural practice by painting her kitchen, which you can see pictures of here.

I did eventually complete the mural at the child care center, which you can see here, and with that, Brighton Murals was born.

Fast forward to spring of 2013 as I'm creating this blog and strolling down memory lane back entering all of my history.  I've goggled "Brighton Murals" to see how my business name withstood the test of time.  Not bad!  There is another Brighton Murals out there, but it's in the UK.  There are also a few USA companies that have "Brighton" in the business name because it's the name of the city they are located, but their complete business name is different, so I don't seem to be competing with anyone locally for the name.  I am a little sad that I don't still own the url though.

UPDATE 12/31/13:
I was playing around online and guess what?  Muralsbylisa.com is working at least for today!  Check it out and if it isn't working when you do, try back later.

Dinosaur Play Room

A friend of mine ran a child care program out of her home and asked if I would paint a dinosaur themed mural in her play room. 

Here is the end result

The plan was to have the kids who attended the child care program to put their green hand prints on the tree for leaves. That is why there are lots of branches and not many leaves.



The body of the purple dinosaur wrapped all the way around the room and behind the door and closets.  I Photoshoped the four walls flat to create a better sense of the finished mural in the picture below.