Jul 4

Jul 4 Outdoor Wooden Mural

I had written this blog before - but it got lost in the new website shuffle. I think it was a pretty interesting process for our first large scale piece. We have since improved upon this time-consuming method and can create large works much faster, but it is still a similar process. Have a look:

Finished product - over 350 pieces of scrap wood.

First we did a mock up on Photoshop. This public art piece is located in Montague, Prince Edward Island. The town was established based on the historical sawmills, gristmills, and proximity to water. We wanted to incorporate the town's history - and the town's wood - into the design.

Photoshop mock up of design- was planned to go on a different building.

Then we laid out our physical paper canvas: 20 feet wide and 8 feet high. Lenny got to work drawing the detail of the design.

After the design was drawn, we numbered each section and created a sort of coding system to reference each piece to its placement in the larger drawing:

Then we got to work cutting out each piece and tracing them onto scrap wood to be cut out.

And trying to remember to label the back of each piece as we cut them so we can easily piece the design back together.

We highlighted our little map as we went (printed photographs of the drawing):

And we start piecing it together:

And give it a few coats of protective finish to make it through a hurricane or five.

Next we lay it out on plywood - and glue + screw each piece to it. Then we cut away the excess with a jigsaw. We keep each panel separate for easy installation.

All ready to go!

We lined up brackets along the wall with super long screws. Then we just lifted each piece onto the brackets, screwed them in, and then put in random screws along the face of the mural.

There you have it! We'll show you how we got smarter for our next large scale feature wall in another blog post. This took about 3 months to create - our next one took a couple of weeks. Contact us if you would like us to create you an outdoor/indoor wooden feature wall.