If you’ve been following my blog, we’re staying on track with Train Murals. I spent six and a half weeks painting every hallway and every classroom in the Kid’s Ministry area of my church to give children the feeling they were going on a journey aboard The Grace Express. It was a lot of fun, but also A LOT of ground to cover. So now, in Part 4, I’ll show you where to Find Inspiration for a project this size.
Inspiration from books
First off, I know nothing about trains, so I was thrilled when someone lent me a stack of railway history books that had awesome photos. It was from there that I got the idea to paint water towers and telephone poles in addition to the trains. (I never really noticed before that they were always along railroad tracks.)
Inspiration from etsy
I also went online and searched through Free Clip Art and other train artwork. There were so many images, the trick was knowing my artistic skill level and limits. I went with simple designs from the internet that I knew I could not only pull off, but that I could embellish a bit and make them more my style. Here are some examples, beginning with this cool, all black decal I found on etsy.com:
Here’s my hand painted version:
Inspiration from online clip art
I fell in love with this next cartoon train from pixgood.com because of it’s simplicity, and knew it would be perfect for the baby nursery:
I didn’t change it too much because it doesn’t get any cuter than this. I just added an extra car and some text. Here’s my painted version:
I found this adorable little engineer on clipartbest.com. But you’ll notice he has sticks for arms. I added full arms, made his coveralls striped, and gave him a more poofy engineer’s cap.
Here’s my hand painted version:
I downloaded dozens of images onto my phone, so that I could be inspired by them every time I was faced with a blank wall. Before I knew it, all the walls were filled.
The only thing missing now…. railroad tracks. Yes, I went there! See how I painted tracks on concrete floors in my final blog entry of Train Murals. I’ve saved the best for last!
One Response