Artool Archives - McDonalds Mural by Timm Kurtz

You Deserve an Art Break Today,

and artist Timm Kurtz Serves Up a Classic Mural...
Did Somebody Say "High Culture?"

(Click on any image to see a larger view)
Reprinted with permission from Airbrush Action (February 2000)

When a Las Vegas art gallery owner first approached me about a mural project for a new McDonald’s restaurant, I couldn’t help but think that I’d have to develop a composition featuring the McBurgler and Ronald in a McFlurry cup or something to that effect. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that some Mickey D’s are adding a bit of bistro appeal. Non-corporate owners have the luxury of adding their own flavor to their shops and, in this case, the owner had chosen a sophisticated spread of textures and colors that made me want to grab a bottle of wine, some cheese, and a loaf of pumpernickel. McCool, I thought!

The wall space was approximately 30’ wide and 7’ high, an average sized mural. The painting would incorporate fall-type colors and materials containing muted olive greens, warm cabernet reds, subtle blues and silvers, and a range of earthy ochre in a somewhat traditional landscape, painted on canvas and then transferred to the substrate.

Awhile back, I was introduced to Chromacolour Paints, a relatively new line of fine artists paints that I’d been using for illustration work and found to be fantastic. Highly pigmented, they can be laid onto a surface as a highly transparent wash or slapped on as a thick impasto. For airbrushing, they dilute well, seem to have much less clogging and drying problems, and hold their integrity.

Personally speaking, I’m not comfortable with projecting ready-made images and coloring in the lines, especially when I’m painting landscapes, earthscapes, or prison escapes. The reward in art, especially offered in a public forum, is originality. Therefore, I don’t project ready-made images—if I project, they are my own sketches. Everything is hand drawn or painted.

I made a hand-painted color comp of my sketch to scale and proceeded to prepare my canvas. My idea for this landscape was a combination of places; a little French Riviera, Southern California, Old Forest Appalachia, and Colorado tossed in for good measure. All of the references for the landscapes came from my imagination and experience. I challenged myself to create a place that invokes a sense of realism, yet exists nowhere else but in this particular space.

Step 1: I threw everything I will use on my dining room table, including brushes, a spray bottle, Styrofoam plates, specimen bottles (my sister works for a rheumatologist), bottled water bottles, an ugly apron, paints, and an Iwata BE-2 and an HP-C.

Here are some tips to save time and money: First, relax and think about your painting. Separate the composition into approximately six major or primary colors (let’s call them base colors) somewhere in the middle value range. Warm them up or cool them down accordingly. Take the bottled water and dump it into a plastic salad bowl, or something similar. Mix the base colors with the water until they reach the right airbrushing consistency and return them to the containers. Do the same with the specimen bottles (which are airtight and will last for eons, if you can get your hands on any), mixing to a thicker consistency for brush work. By adding your base colors’ complements, and adjusting the value up or down, you create about 18-36 shades of color from your original six.

Use Styrofoam plates. They are light, cheap, and you can turn one on top of the other to keep paints wet for an extra day or so. And you can toss them when you’re finished. Most importantly, become accustomed to using a spray bottle. When you’re using a brush, you can lightly mist the area first to facilitate your brush strokes, and mist your palette to keep your paints from drying out.

Step 2: My recipe for fire retarding comes from the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) recommendations for theatrical usage. Basically, it’s a composition of Powdered Borax, Boric Acid and H₂0. This is the only recipe I have found that is low in toxicity, economical, and keeps the material pliable. I saturate the canvas—10 oz. cotton duck—on both sides twice with a garden sprayer and allow it to dry thoroughly. (Muslin is okay, but remember to use a tight weave, otherwise wallpaper adhesive may leak through the mural when it is brushed onto the wall.) The canvas is coated three times with ground or gesso. The side to be painted gets two coats; the other side gets one. This eliminates wallpaper paste seepage during the installation.

Step 3: After gridding up the design and drawing in a few lines, I mix up a sepia color and begin washing in the design. I refer to my original sketch for placement. Make sure that you paint at least 6 inches over on all sides of the mural to compensate for trimming during installation.

Step 4: Still using brushes, I begin to color wash in the back-ground. There are many ways to create the illusion of depth in a painting. I still find the best method is an aerial perspective. Mix your colors appropriately using blue tints in your greens, grays, and browns, and white in your yellows, reds, oranges and blues. Do not paint full strength!

To avoid getting too dark and detailed, I spray frequently with my sprayer while I brush in the background. Later, I’ll soften up areas with the airbrush and add a layer of pale yellow to the entire area.

Step 5: I begin to brush in mid and foreground areas using large brushes, sponges, fingers—whatever I can find. When using acrylic type paints, I paint backgrounds light to dark. My fore and mid areas are painted dark to light. Keep spraying and stay loose. These steps are merely blocking in shapes.

Step 6: Here’s a good example of how style and originality come through by drawing rather than projecting. This picture of an old mill was found in a magazine. The perspective was totally wrong "as is." I corrected the perspective as I drew by using a string and thumb, placing the thumbtack where I wanted the vanishing point to be. In this case, the eye of the viewer is taken directly to the center of the valley, creating the effect of being high on a mountain. I changed the small outbuilding and added a McDonald’s emblem, canopy, and railing.

Step 7: Using my Big Dude—the Iwata HP-BE—I spray a very light blue (nearly white) where I want my source of light to be. Afterwards, I detail waves and splashy type things. The best brush for this is a medium sized round brush with a bit of a point.

Step 8: Now, randomly creating rocks, foliage, fish jumping, I use my base colors and their complements to create variations. White and yellow ochre to lighten, prussian/thalo blue, hookers green and umber to darken.

Step 9: As I add a tree, I try to remember distance, dimension, and the light source, which in this case will be somewhat scattered. Using my Iwata HP-C, I spray shadows and detail some bark. I don’t want too much detail in the middle ground. Knowing that a little can mean a lot, I shoot for an impressionistic approach instead. Remember, if your painting doesn’t look good up close, it won’t look much better far away. Paint from dark to light, highlighting more needed.

Step 10: When doing these types of murals, I often find myself adding important elements later on, many of which never appeared on my original sketch. To paint this deer, I choose the small brush again and begin painting it in directly from the source. I usually sketch most things with my brush and continue to build from there. Once you start painting, pencils are really unnecessary. Often I’ll sketch with my airbrush.

Step 11: Painting faux textures can be an interesting addition to any mural. This corner of the mural poses a visual problem, so I decide to break up the landscape with a separate element, a wall, that I’d paint to look like stucco and brick. Imagining how these things look and feel, I sponge a brown-orange color over the entire area, swirling in a little white and yellow ochre. I also rough in bricks with the sponge. Using a dark color and good-sized flat brush, I paint in the mortar around the bricks, and I shadow areas at the edge of the stucco. I mix up a light "stucco tan" and dilute it enough to be sprayed out of the sprayer (not the airbrush). I spray, let it dry and spray some more. Picking up a wide flat brush, I "dry brush" lighter shades of earlier colors, tinting with greens and browns. The bricks need much dry brushing with various shades. I add sienna and chroma orange. This whole process should take less than an hour for this 7' x 3' area.

Step 12: Iwata HP-C in hand, pressure in the 20s, I look at the patterns I’ve created and pick out areas to feather in shadow with a transparent gray/brown mixture, which really brings the stucco to life. Keeping true to the light source, most of the shadowing takes place on the bottom and left sides. I add cracks, then "freckle" the surface of the paint (I use a Popsicle stick tilted at the end of my airbrush) with alternating light and dark shades to represent the tiny holes always present in stucco and brick.

Step 13: This area is complete after foliage, flowers, and a vine are added. The airbrush is a major time saver for highlights and shadows, visible beneath the vine, behind the flowers, beneath the bricks and at the edge of the stucco.

Step 14: I had intended to paint Roman style columns, complete with fluting and capital to match a column that was to be built around a footer separating the eating and refreshment area. The foreman, however, framed it in and slapped wallpaper on it. In order to complement the new design, I make the columns more contemporary, squaring them off, and changing the capitals to more of a Southern plantation style. Mixing paint to match the wallpaper colors, I block in the columns with a sponge brush. The vine is painted in a solid mid-green.

Step 15: More leaves are painted in a lighter shade with a small round brush. To create the illusion of dimension, shadows are needed. I use the HP-C again with a transparent gray/brown mixture. A real challenge is to render light and shadows in realistic manner. Since I am not using a model or picture, I have to imagine how light and shadows react on different surfaces. Once adequate shadows are airbrushed in, I detail the vine with a dagger style brush, highlighting, flipping some leaves up, and curling others.

Step 16: My final step is to shape clouds in the sky and soften the background area with that pale yellow I mentioned earlier. This is accomplished using my Iwata BE and HP-C airbrushes. This is a quick way to adjust the aerial perspective. Stand back often and refine as needed. For protection, I spray three coats of satin polyurethane floor finish across the canvas after the painting is finished.

Step 17: One way to break up strong vertical and horizontal lines is to use diagonals. This doorway posed such a problem, I tried to compensate with my tree shape. The mural, now installed in the restaurant, demonstrates how I chose my colors to complement the surroundings.

For installation, the mural is unrolled and laid face-up on the floor. Guidelines are snapped across the top and bottom, allowing one inch for trimming. The wall, having been primed with alkyd- based wallpaper sizing, is prepped with a rolled coat of heavy duty clay-based adhesive. I now have between 30 and 40 minutes to get it installed! The mural is tugged, tossed, and contorted into place, then brushed smooth as areas straighten out. Air pockets are undesirable, but can be removed by making a small cut and then brushing over the area. Touch up as needed.

Step 18: This left half of the mural is an example of the orange tint used for the highlights on he trees, and deeper blues for shadowing. Reflections, wisps of sunlight, and multi-colored flowers all bring this composition together.

Step 19: Tree details on the right side show how I changed the colors to fit elements on the right side of the restaurant. I also added a little squirrel eating a nut amidst the oak type leaves. If you find it difficult to paint without having a likeness available, remember to break everything into three colors, then highlight and shadow from there.

Of course, the best reward is seeing the appreciation on the faces of the people that view your work. Between 30,000 and 50,000 people see this painting each month.

Murals are mentally and physically challenging. Though I work in many styles, this is the type of work I love best. It allows me to move between brush and airbrush, staying loose, working with and not against the elements of art.

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

Timm Kurtz has been a successful artist for 21 years. Working in a variety of media, he generates original murals, illustrations and fine art, and includes airbrushing in more than half his pieces. He lives with his wife and three children on the East Coast, traveling about a third of the year to work on location and attend art shows and events. He is currently focusing on wildlife and outdoor-related art and illustration, and is in the process of authoring how-to books for the art industry.

TECH FILE

Airbrush: Iwata. For mural work, HP-BE2, HP-C, and Eclipse. For clearcoating and large areas, RG-2 and W-88. Air Source: Medea Great White Shark. Includes a 3-stage manifold, 20-foot hoses, oil and water pre-filters and three in-line air hose filters. Mostly, I spray between 40 and 60 psi. Paint Medium: Chromacolour, Golden, and Createx Surface Medium: 10 or 12 oz. tight-weave cotton or muslin canvas. Canvas is fire-retarded to NFPA standards, then I add 2-3 layers of high quality gesso. Projector: If I do project, I use my Super AG-100. Lighting: In my studio, a mixture of fluorescent tubes (blue cast), soft white bulbs (yellow cast), and halogen spots (silver-white cast). I can adjust to the lighting of a project’s final destination by increasing or removing elements of my lighting arrangement. Ventilation: Because mural art takes up so much space, adequate ventilation is very difficult, but I use large fans and open as many doors as possible. I always use an approved acrylic/latex spray mask.