February 17, 2006
Monterey Intertidal Mural
Last weekend I completed a second mural in the home of my friends Bob and Yvonne. When they were expecting their first child in late 2004, I was commissioned to paint his nursery with a Monterey Bay kelp forest scene. They were so happy with the results, they asked me to do it again when they found out they were expecting a second baby! The two rooms are adjoining, so they decided the theme should continue, this time with the ocean gradually becoming intertidal and then beach and sand dunes. This of course meant I got an opportunity to put BIRDS in the mural, as well as some other land critters. It was a 36-hours-in-four-days marathon, but I am so happy about how it turned out. I hope the new baby will love it too!
Bob and Yvonne prepped the room by painting it with regular eggshell finish wall paint, ocean color up to about eye-level and then sky blue above. I then sketched out the scene using soft vine charcoal, and then painted the mural using regular acrylic paint.
This mural was fueled primarily by coffee, PJ Harvey, and Bob and Yvonne's fabulous cooking.
See more pics? (warning: biology nerd alert!)
Here's the corner of the room next to the closet, opposite the window. This part was really challenging -- I had to figure out how to transition from underwater to above water. Some fudging goes on, and some forced perspective, but overall I think it worked out pretty well!
This is the above-closet view, mostly sky and the top of the dune grass.
Some area/creature closeups, going from the deep ocean to dry land:
The window wall (on the left) represents the open ocean, and the sea section of the wall is painted in a darker blue than the ocean on the intertidal wall. Most of the room's furniture will be against this wall, so there wasn't much room for critters over here. However, two beautiful pelican wall sculptures will fly above the water (and above the window). The crib will be in this corner, and the height of the animals is (hopefully) set up so the baby will see them looking down on her from all sides. To the right of the window, right above the head of the crib, is a speedy albacore! On the other side of the corner we transition into the bay, and a big sheepshead swims towards shore.
The kelp forest mural features a happy harbor seal, right above the crib, so of course this mural needed a big happy marine mammal too. The otter and pelican also look back towards the crib. The way the pelican turned out made me especially happy -- he looks like a stern babysitter. No staying up all night playing with the otter, young lady!
This is a closeup of the intertidal zone. Most of this area would be exposed to the air if the tide were out, but this mural depicts high tide. I thought the seaweed would be more beautiful flowing underwater than flattened out in a heap like it is when the water isn't there to hold it up. The fish poking out of the hole is called a "sarcastic fringehead", one of Yvonne's special requests :) The orange starfish is a bat star, and the purple one is called an ochre star (also known as a type of pisaster, a very important species in Monterey Bay ecology). The anenomes are called giant green anemones, and the lobster is a spiny lobster, which is a Monterey Bay species, although Bob said they actually aren't that common. The stripey fish sitting on the rock is called a painted sculpin, and that weird brown lump above the sculpin is an animal called a gumboot chiton.
There are four species of marine algae (aka 'seaweed') featured in this mural -- you can see two of them here, fucus distichus on the left, and postelsia,or sea palm. The sea grass to the left is actually not marine algae, but a plant. I took marine botany way back at UCSC, it finally came in handy!
This is a view further up the rocks, and you can also see the piling the pelican is sitting on from underwater. That's another ochre star, and there are also mussels and a green algae called ulva growing on the piling. The crab is a striped rock crab. The small green blobs above the crab are called aggregating anenomes.
This corner is where the main wall of the room meets the closet wall.
Here on the beach are some shorebirds -- the two running along the surfline are called sanderlings, and that's really what they always seem to be doing. The tall black and white bird is aptly named a stilt.
An extremely rare sub-species of garter snake lives along the coast between San Francisco and Monterey -- rare because its habitat is so limited. I've heard there are only about 4,000 of these guys, and I was lucky enough to see one in the wild once! They are really striking with their red and blue stripes. I just had to put one in here. Above the snake is American dune grass.
Here is a closeup of a couple of the animals that you can see above the closet. On the dead branch perches a peregrine falcon, and the butterflies are monarchs. Monarchs appear in Monterey Bay en masse once a year to breed, so they are another distinctively local species.
For the sake of completeness, I will list the other species in the mural not already mentioned:
rosy sculpin
surf perch
red-winged blackbird
grey fox
double-crested cormorant
laminaria (a brown algae)
oh man I can't remember the name of the snail!
See, it's not just neat, it's edu-muh-cational!