Developing a Mural for a Region

Atchison Kansas Hospital Mural

Last year I began a collaborative effort with a local graphic designer, Peg Harvard of Harvard Graphics, in developing a mural for the new lobby of the Atchison, Kansas Hospital.

They were looking for someone with a knowledge of graphics as well as good drawing skills to produce a mural design that would be etched into glass on 4 panels.

First we came up with

a rough idea of the mural layout

using a fluid motion left to right to convey the feeling of traveling through time.

Next we worked on a 4 panel pencil drawing depicting what we envisioned the mural to look like. Using each panel as a kind of time line from left to right, we included the prairies with bison and old time windmills, Lewis & Clark, the city hall building and farmlands in the back, Amelia Earhart, the aviation pioneer and her family home, a train representing the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, a grain elevator and the Kansas crops of corn, wheat and sunflowers, as well as Kansas celebrity John Cameron Swayse.

After submitting the sketches, we waited several weeks until a committee began suggesting changes including

adding a conestoga wagon, taking out the Earhart home

and adding the original hospital, adding a clinic building and changing JCS to the Cray Diabetes Management Center founder.

After consulting with Peg who was the director on this project, I decided to continue the final art production work in egg tempera on 4 panels. That would give the mural the detail that was needed and could later be built upon in color. Each panel was scanned into my computer and we prepared the 4 panels as digital files for the glass etcher in Kansas.

Finally after approval the images were sent on disk as both negative and positive files for the etcher to use. And the result was an almost 3 dimensional piece of etched glass art thanks to the etcher who separated elements of the mural to be placed in front while the background was etched in the back of the glass.

Here you can see a couple detail image areas from the panel art and finally the actual glass etching in the lobby of the hospital in Atchison.