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.
 

With the exception of my iPhone dying last Saturday, the San Diego city mural is now complete and installed with a minimum of hassle. Here’s a quick camera pic for now while I organize the rest– until I get my iPhone repaired or replaced, no more instant publishing.

cityscape mural complete - ladder shot

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So after a sunny early autumn blur back to Pittsburgh– unloading the truck (finally!), moving stuff around with Heather in the new place, meeting new friends and neighbors Scott and Winfrey, Yolanda and Charlie, Tommy and Jennifer and all of their kids and dogs (our neighborhood, Point Breeze, rules!) and taking Hunter to and from school today — I’m back on the plane to San Diego.

This plane goes through Denver, making three different in-between airports in the last week (Atlanta & Charlotte first) while juggling new business venture, new painting project, new city, new house in Pittsburgh, new temporary arrangements in San Diego– who knew even I could cram this much stuff into one month and its not even the 15th yet, especially considering I left San Diego for Pittsburgh in Heather’s car on September 1st!

Anyway, the highlight of the mural project prep last week in SD was my Friday night visit to the top of 501 West Broadway with photographer Mike Brown to research the missing views of the cityscape mural– “missing” insofar as the client wants to replace a few skyscrapers with more ocean, marina and sky.

Some of these aren’t so inspiring, but its what’s being hidden by the buildings to be removed, so Mike’s super high resolution pix and mighty zoom lens make them just what I needed.

I posted a view of these pix in real time from the roof (because the evening was too beautiful not to!) with my iPhone to Twitter and beyond, so Mike shot my portrait last thing, with my face actually lit by the phone.

What a difference ten years makes– no one seemed concerned about two artists with cameras wanting to be on the top of one of the tallest building in downtown San Diego on the ten year anniversary of 9/11.

I’ll post drafts of the revised mural drawings with all this new detail as soon as they are ready!

I’ve been keeping track of the mural project at Cafe Mundo here in Banker’s Hill with my iPhone and some instant real time publishing through my pages on Facebook and Twitter, so I thought I’d catch up some our progress here before heading over to for this morning’s session.

I’ve been very pleased to work with artist Jessica Siemens, who you may remember I mentored earlier this spring in marketing her excellent work via blogging and social media on the way to her first “art fair” appearance in April at Little Italy’s ArtWalk. (For more detail on that, search for articles on Jessica over on the San Diego Finishing School site.)

Anyway, we’ve been having a blast getting to paint together (rather than working on marketing paintings together:) and we’ve been accompanied off and on by my babies, Hunter (4) and Logan (2)– no, they don’t have their own websites yet– so I hope you enjoy these pictures.

Cafe Mundo mural progress

Cafe Mundo mural painting

Mural details

Jessica paints, Hunter and Logan supervise!

Hunter practices his craft

UPDATE: on the mobile publishing thing, youcan see all the pictures I’ve taken of this project so far on my Flickr page, which I’ve got dialed in with the great Ping.fm service.

Here’s some iPhone progress pics of the Cafe Mundo mural painting from yesterday. I was playing with “real-time” publishing– these are already posted on my Facebook page via Twitter, Ping.fm and Flickr.

mural painting progress at Cafe Mundo August 12, 2009

mural painting progress at Cafe Mundo August 12, 200

• Cafe Mundo mural drawing pics from my iPhone, http://ping.fm/p/2X2yF #
• Finally working on the mural outdoors at Cafe Mundo inking in the weekend's pencil constructions. #
• I uploaded a YouTube video — The LifeChain project, part 6 http://bit.ly/17A3vH #

I’m going to put up more of this stuff on my actual mural and faux painting blog, but since I started here and I’m still screwing with the social media hook ups, I’m putting these up here first as an antidote to the iPhone pics I sent form the jobsite this morning.

Except for the “straight line details” inside the architectural bits, drawing and inking complete, painting starts tomorrow.

If you’re in San Diego, come by Cafe Mundo, 121 Juniper Street in Banker’s Hill tomorrow morning for coffee from 8-10am and check it out.

Cafe Mundo mural in Banker's Hill, San Diego

Cafe Mundo mural in Banker's Hill, San Diego

Here’s the rendering sketch again from the last post about this mural project:

black and white concept sketch for Cafe Mundo mural