Its been crazy busy as the snow continues to fall here in Pittsburgh.
 
Since we’re moving this month into our new house, we have
two houses to shovel and the typical delays accompanying a total of
some 30″ of snow in the last two weeks:

 
work that needs done,
stuff to be hauled away, stuff to be moved in, all waiting,
with the rest of this somewhat unprepared
small city, for a the roads to get better, the snow to stop falling,
a break in the action somehow so I can get on with what
I have to do.
 
Now the bright side is that what I have been able to do
waiting for the world to dig itself out is paint–
well, prep for painting and paint, taking a poor condition
second floor and making it sealed, clean and safe for us to sleep in.
 
People who’ve worked with me know I actually do get excited about an excellent
prep job, and I’m proud to say that given time alotted (actually scraped somewhat painfully from the childcare schedule),
and poor conditions we started with, the repaired and fresh walls and ceiling have really came out great.
 
so I’ll be posting some iPhone pix of progress sequence here next, but I want to
give a shout out to one of my favorite products here that just got written up in the
almighty New York Times.
 
I’ve already been using the brilliant, zero-VOC Transitional Primer from AFM Safecoat on
what I call “welding” all the different surfaces together into a decent “canvas” on which to paint, in this case:
 

• previously painted drywall
• previously painted plaster
• previously painted pine/waterbased
• previously painted pine/leadbased/
• raw poplar
• raw pine
• lots of acrylic caulking
• fresh drywall
• fresh mud
• waterbased catalyzed resin

AFM Safecoat paints are completely green, non-toxic products, and as the article points out, even smell good out of the can. They do a whole line of interior paints, and also a line of all-natural wood finishes that I’ve used extensively on custom hardwood picture frames the past few years in San Diego.
 
Highly recommended from personal experience and will be generally available in Pittsburgh soon.
 

Here are some pictures from the first two days of actually putting paint on the vertical blind “canvas” itself, after a week plus of prep.

city mural sky painting

I painted the sky almost entirely with my Iwata spray guns and a lot of careful masking– its always *really* gratifying to pull the masking away and see a painted finish running clean to its edges!

city mural sky painting detail

After the skyline gets detailed, I put the paper drawings back down to transfer the rest of the image:

city mural drawings down a second time

The cityscape develops one piece at a time– the drawings are cut into five or six pieces for manageability.

cityscape mural drawing

Its now “official” that Heather and I are moving our studio and kids to Pittsburgh at the end of August, and I’ve been so busy with projects that I haven’t posted as much in the way of updates as its happened–> so much so fast!>

I’ve been working on a slew of new websites for my marketing clients as well, while trying to keep up with my wife Heather’s jewelry design work because she’s been doing a lot of work in the run-up to the move, too.

At any rate this month I’m working on my final mural and faux painting project in San Diego (for the forseeable future anyway- I will be back for other business from time to time, so I suppose its not out of the question to arrange something) at my friends Cafe Mundo around the corner here in Banker’s Hill, and this morning I started the exterior mural part of the project and had part 1 of an art studio moving sale over coffee all at the same– thanks to everyone who came out, I’ll be doing the same next Saturday with even more art making stuff sorted out to be sold cheap or given away. I still have some good tools for sale, and a variety of picture frames, stretcher bars for canvas, and painting panels.

Cafe Mundo is a simple little neighborhood coffee shop– we’re just putting a little polish on the details and creating an exterior “landmark” while they are partially closed for a kitchen upgrade to their pizza making component.

The “landmark” is a 16′ x 8′ mural on four panels designed around local Banker’s Hill imagery given a light Parisian art nouveau twist derived from the Cafe’s adopted icon– both images shown below. (Pics tomorrow!)

black and white concept sketch fpr Cafe Mundo mural

Cafe Mundo icon and inspiration