Broad Stroke Kinda Girl

I am a "broad stroke" kind of girl... I love big paintings, broad strokes and lots of colour. Becoming an adult woman has taught me many lessons, some the hard way. I'm definitely not a perfectionist - detail work doesn't come naturally. As a kid, my room was always messy. My art studio is messy too, but it's an organized messy ;).

Through the lessons of life, raising children and the many job experiences I've had, detail has out of necessity become a learned attribute. I wouldn't be able to perform my work as an administrative assistant without some planning, detail and organization.

The Mulli book project entails a lot of detail. I have learned to appreciate the detail and enjoy the results. For example, two of the recent paintings I've worked on for the story have involved multi people, and some of them actually have to look like the characters. Mulli and his wife Esther are two of them in the paintings. I don't have a lot of photos of Esther and sometimes need to piece together the Mulli character from several photos, and then adjust it to make him look younger to suit the storyline. Whew! 

One detail that amazed me was the car in this photo. I looked on the internet for a "rich man's car" to paint that would be appropriate for the time period when Mulli started his businesses. I chose an older model  Mercedes. Little did I know, (Paul told me later) that Charles Mulli owned a Mercedes as one of his first cars... neat oh!

The details in the series of paintings are what will make the book special. The expressions on the faces, the symbolism, and the hints of what is to come, all seem to work themselves into the paintings. I want The Biggest Family in the World to be a very unique and interesting book to read and look at. A part of the story will be in the printed word provided by Paul H. Boge,  and the rest of the story will be told in the painstaking detail of the paintings.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the size of the project, but I work on two pages at a time and try not to think about how many are left. About one third is almost complete. Yay!

The Biggest Family in the World - a new children's book based on the life of Charles Mulli, planned for publication in 2014. This is a blog chronicling the book's creation from the perspective of the artist.