Backyard Mural

After years of talking about it, I am finally going to attempt to paint a large mural in my backyard on the exterior of our house. We have a large blank wall and just a few height-challenged plants in front of it. I started by sketching out some ideas, rejecting them and finally settling on the one I deemed to be the EASIEST. It depicts one of my family's favorite vacation destinations - Sand Harbor, Tahoe.

After I got the thumbnail sketch fleshed out I transferred the simplified design to a gridded paper. The challenge was how to transfer this image to my very heavily textured stucco wall. A couple years ago I painted some butterflies on the front of the house just to get a feel for how difficult painting on this material would be -- VERY! Well, drawing on it isn't any easier! I ended up using a large piece of graphite and resigning myself to the fact that my "drawing" would be very "loose" indeed. Hey, if it doesn't work out I can always just repaint the wall, right?!!

I used white tape, a yardstick, a ladder and a large level to help me "install" the grid on the wall. Then, using the large chunk of graphite I started to draw in my design. Here are my efforts so far.