theBarnstorming: The Home Stretch

April 03, 2007

The Home Stretch

When we woke up this morning, I figured we'd be done around noon, 1:00pm at the latest. Robbi, being slightly less optimistic, suggested we'd probably be able to leave around three. I wondered if we'd have trouble with traffic at that hour.

Now it's 12:15am. On Tuesday. A full 11 hours and 45 minutes past my worst case scenario.

The good news is, the mural looks pretty good. The bad news? There really isn't any. I'm just a bad estimator.

Hours and hours ago now, Robbi started with the line work. She started with the odd faux-Japanese characters (being a faux-Japanese character herself).

She continued on, adding definition to the pagoda-thing.

And faces to the anguished (full-fledged) Japanese people.

Including her twin sister, Study in Despair, #2. Robbi admits that this drawing makes her think of Popeye.

As she worked, the afternoon sunshine came in:

And shone upon the wall:

Now, since this is an Idiots'Books venture and not a "Robbi Behr paints a wall" venture, there are some words. And hateful though it may be to Robbi to have to paint words, letter by careful letter, the time eventually came to do so.

Here's how we do it: Robbi prints out the words at 100 percent scale, on pieces of paper, which I tape together so that we can tape them on the wall for placement. Also, so that Robbi doesn't have to guess how wide and tall each character should be, we actually transfer the font onto the wall using an extremely clever technique. Basically, we put a lot of white chalk on the back side of the paper with the text. We tape the paper to the wall. And then some sorry sucker has to painstakingly trace each and every letter. Using a great deal of pressure, mind you. Without putting overmuch pressure on the rest of the paper, in order to keep smudges to a minimum, mind you...

Where was Robbi going to find a sucker at that tiime of day?