Penguins & Murals

I've been doing some drawing of penguins lately, for children's singer-songwriter Barry Peters. Penguins are such easy subjects for a cartoonist to draw. They are innately wacky.

And a mural! In fifteen years of drawing I've done t-shirts, cd covers, various packaging, books aplenty, banners, pavement art, a small 70's sports coupe but NEVER a mural. I finished it a week ago. It is for a gallery-cum-giftshop-cum-cafe. These are some quick photos I took when I was finishing the mural. The giftshop opens next week so I'll post photos of the mural 'in situ' when the store is stocked and properly set up.

I loved the physicality of doing this job. Big posca textas, dirty elbows and lots of stretching were involved. As you can see the wall itself stretched up to a second storey so there were ladders, planks, stairs, and at one stage a table-ladder-plank-stair combination. It's hard to work scaffolding around stairs, I'm told. Thankfully, I'm not too bad with heights. That said, when working on the high areas I needed to clean my hands regularly because otherwise my palms would get sweaty and then I'd leave smudgy marks on the wall. The arches of my feet also tended to get a little crampy-I think my feet were involuntarily trying to grip the ladder. Monkey-style. Nice.

Normally the high-risk elements of my job are limited to the ol' coffee on keyboard catastrophe, and forgetting to close the lid of the scanner. So it was a nice change. Here's some detail: