Day One at the Art Park: Prep Work, Primer, and Perspective
Day 1 painting the largest art piece I’ve done to date
Day One at the Art Park: Prep Work, Primer, and Perspective
Today was the first real workday on my Cortez Streetscapes Art Park mural panel.
It was not the glamorous part of mural work.
It was the practical part.
Sanding. Cleaning. Patching. Priming. Checking the board. Learning the space. Looking closely at what the surface needed before it could become a painting.
Before the art can appear, the surface has to be ready.
That is one of the first lessons of exterior mural work. The paint is only as strong as the surface underneath it. If the prep work fails, the painting eventually fails with it. Good mural work begins long before the first beautiful layer of color goes down.
My assigned panel is board #6, a tall 7.5-foot by 3.5-foot space at the Cortez Art Park. I spent the day getting acquainted with it as an actual physical object, not just a design in my mind. It had dings, screw holes, rough places, and a few small problems that needed attention.
So I treated the board like any good mural surface deserves to be treated.
I sanded. I patched. I primed. I painted the edges. I checked the attachment points. I began preparing the board to hold the artwork for the long haul.
This is the part people may not always see when they look at a finished mural, but it matters. Especially outdoors. Sun, wind, moisture, heat, cold, and time will all have their say. The artist has to prepare for that from the beginning.
A mural is not just an image.
It is a surface, a structure, a weather-facing object, and a public artwork.
Today I began with respect for that.
There is something grounding about the beginning of a project like this. No color yet. No big reveal. No finished magic. Just tools, primer, dust, a ladder, and the quiet knowledge that the foundation matters.
It felt good to begin.
~Kit S.
Kit Swan Artworks: Create something beautiful today.
