murals

The Discovery Center at the Museum of Science in Boston commissioned me to create two murals featuring New England Forest Animals. I was especially excited to collaborate with them, since I had worked at the museum for a number of years, running the internship program and teaching in the Overnight program.

Here are some images of the larger mural (sixteen feet long & eighteen inches high), which is currently under the windows, at the back wall of the Discovery Center, behind the giant tree stump model

This is the whole thing –

and here are some of the details, a bit closer up:

Here’s part of the mural in place (with my assistants in the foreground, playing with the giant acorns & mushrooms from the stump play area).

If you’re interested in how I tackled this project, here’s a blog post on the process, including early sketches.

The second mural (80″ long, 30″ high) is tucked along the side of the stump, hanging from the railing above the beaver dam play area, complete with beaver costumes and fabric sticks to weave.  The image below is a gif, showing the actual mural as well as “map” of the image, labeling the animals and plants represented by request from the Discovery Center staff.

The second mural in place, with my assistants, a few years later.

Each of these murals was drawn digitally in photoshop (at a huge size that made my computer grumble each time I opened a file), so that the images could be printed on a special material that could be easily transported if the exhibit locations ever need to change.

Since I studied field biology and organism-level biology in college, this project was especially appealing to me. I’d love to work on more mural projects in the future – either digitally or with traditional materials!