Murals in Process: Massive Canvas Building at the Electric Maid
One of my current mural projects is a painting for the stage at the Electric Maid in DC’s Takoma neighborhood. The Electric Maid provides local musicians a place to put on live shows. Renovations are underway to enhance the Maid even further into a groovy community space, complete with Wifi, food and coffee, and just good ol’ fashioned neighborhood comfy-ness. Plans are afoot for movie showings in addition to their musical performances. Plus the Maid has a piano in it, which I think more places need to have on the whole.
While the Electric Maid is being primped, prepped and renovated to become this super cool place, I am honored to be a part of the process by creating a mural for their stage. I’ll be cataloguing the process here, starting at the very beginning:
Due to certain needs for the use of the stage, Electric Maid staff and I decided that the mural should not be painted directly on the wall…. SO, If a mural doesn’t go on a wall, where does it go, you ask? It gets painted on a separate surface that can be installed… and then later deinstalled if need be. The benefits to removeable murals are many, including that if you ever want to move your home/office/business, you can bring your mural with you.
Our first step was to figure out the best surface to use. We decided to make a massive stretched canvas measuring 76” x 140”. In an eye-bugging discovery, I found out stretcher bars for canvases of this colossal size are also colossal in price. My immediate thought was ‘absolutely not. i am buying this wood on my own and making it myself.’ So the trip to the art store was substituted with a trip to Home Depot. As might be predicted, this super money saving trick actually ended up being tons more work. I advise anyone who goes down the make-your-own-stretcher-bars road to gather up some patience… and tools. Namely a saw and a drill. Here’s how it worked: We purchased 1” x 2” strips of wood that were about 8 feet long, and sawed these down to their proper lengths for the mural. We also had a 12 ft long 1” x 4” that we sawed lengthwise in half to use for the two longest edges. Once all the wood was the correct length, we attached the corners via these handy metal clamps by marking the wood through the holes in the clamps, drilling holes, and then securing the clamps by drilling in the screws.
That may sound simple enough, but it did take a few hours to make happen. Still, constructing a canvas structure is well worth the effort – I was feeling pretty victorious once this thing was built.
Now that the structure was ready, next came the long process of stretching the canvas onto it. The stretching process basically entailed me walking round and round the canvas, stapling in one staple per side at a time to make sure the canvas is evenly stretched. I think I walked the perimeter of that 140” x 76” rectangle 50 times. All worth it for the end product:
Here’s to the largest canvas I have ever personally stretched. My own little record – yay!
