Clients of mine are completely renovating their new home in Duxbury and wanted a mural to bring something special, impactful and truly custom to their front foyer – which is when they called me!

Their idea was to use a photo from the Martha’s Vineyard beach where they were married (see below) as inspiration for the mural, which they wanted painted over a chair rail in a space about 9’ x 4.5’. When I met with my clients in the home, we talked about exactly what they wanted to see - noting that I did not have to paint it exactly as it was in the picture! With this in mind, they decided to have me enhance the image by increasing the size of the water, getting rid of the ship masts on the right and adding a sailboat with the American flag sail. I also needed to crop and edit the image to fit the dimensions of the space.

As always, my first step was to create a concept painting to show my approach to addressing their requests (below). I make these paintings to scale (in this case, 9”x18”) using the actual paints I would use on the wall. They loved my concept – so I was on to planning for the final project!

Once on-site, I start by transferring my drawing to the wall – and then I paint each element from background to foreground, top to bottom. Below are pictures of various stages as I painted this mural.