Mural for YHA Oxford Street

YHA Oxford Street wanted to brighten up their locker room. After some discussion, we decided on a Soho theme, to encourage interest in the local area. Here is the pencil design:

The work in progress:

The finished product:

“Jenny's brief was to cheer up the plain white wall in our left luggage store room with a lively Soho mural. It was important to me that the subject matter reflected the heart of this area and it’s people. Jenny's solution did exactly that; the variety of small shops and businesses in Soho are well represented in the mural and play an important part in encouraging tourists to venture beyond the obvious draw of large department stores into the smaller, locally owned cafes and boutiques.”

Third Corridor

Here are the latest photos of the mural I've been painting along the corridors of Palmers Lodge, Hillspring. The first photo is of the work in progress so you can imagine the process a little better.

Palmers Lodge, Hillspring

Here are some photos of a mural project I have been painting on the corridors of a youth hostel called Palmers Lodge, Hillspring. The manager wanted the same buildings repeated, so instead of drawing everything by hand, I drew templates for each building on large pieces of tracing paper. In order to transfer them to the wall, I masking taped the corners of the tracing paper and drew along the lines on the reverse side to create a light pencil impression of each design on the wall. This made it easy to maintain the perfect geometry of each building as they are tilted at angles.

Complete design for Just In Case

After the initial approved version below, I mapped the shape of the walls around the bar area and completed my design to fit in around the space. The owners of Just In Case Cafe & Wine Bar absolutely adored it but said they wanted to get some other things organised with the restaurant before asking me to begin work.

Mural Design for a Brazilian restaurant

Here is the preliminary design for the walls of a restaurant and wine bar in London, called Just In Case. I just drew up about a quarter of the whole design I have in mind in case the client wants changes. They have live music performed there and a strong Brazilian culture, so this is what I drew from. The man playing the flute is Tom Jobim.

Jaguar in a tree

As I painted the parrot, my client was thinking that he would like something else a little larger on the other side of the room to balance it out, tying into the same theme.
He wants something a little more stylised this time but maintaining the same harmony with the parrot. I have decided to do a stylised tree in the corner of the room with a fairly realistic jaguar sleeping on one of the branches. I didn't have to spend long persuading him!
I have only drawn the design in pencil on paper so stay tuned for pictures of the work in progress as I will begin painting this afternoon.

Blue Macaw

A friend of a friend asked me to paint something for his son's wall. He wanted something colourful from nature that his seven-year-old boy wouldn't grow out of. As the father is from Brazil, I suggested some tropical Amazonian icons and showed him a few possibilities.
He chose the blue macaw in flight because it wouldn't look strange in isolation - many other plants and animals would need to be a part of a scene or there would at least need to be an implied ground level somewhere.
This photo is of the work in progress that I took as I was waiting for the paint to dry; the client says he will take a photo of the finished product to send me soon (my battery died)! Since then, I have added some orange shadows to the yellow of its wing and belly, and some light blue highlights to the blue parts of the back wing and top of the tail.
The painting took me about 6 hours, with a few half-hour breaks as I needed to wait for the base coats to dry before adding details. I charged £80.
When my client's son saw the parrot, he squealed with excitement and after a while pretended that we were in a jungle. It was so rewarding for me to see the twinkling in his eyes. Hopefully this macaw will help to keep this young Londoner in touch with his heritage!