Some time ago, I was approached by Greg (one of the orders of Sword and Board Games) to do a mural in their Capitola location. I of course was interested, as I adore doing large scale pieces that bring joy to people. Plus, it was a mix of everything I love: games, fantasy, and putting in cute little references for people to have their “iykyk” moments.

initial sketch, one of three, that was picked to be the final piece

And so, I got to sketching. Of the 3 designs I came up with, this one was the winner. It was simple, cute, and had a lot of room for fun additions.

Then came the digital sketch. This was mostly me trying to figure out the color scheme, as well as figure out some perspective things. This ended up being something I maybe spent too much time on, because in the finished piece you don’t get as much of this effect simply because … my initial measurements weren’t quite right and on top of that, the break in the wall for the curve added it’s own problems to my mental image. But this ended up helping me start to figure out a lot of those details i so desperately wanted.

mural MOST of the way done, some of the background books and dragon details not complete.

And so I got to work. At the start of the project, I thought it was going to take me 4 days of about 12 hours of work each. I was very wrong. As I stated in the last paragraph, I ran into the issue of … not really realizing how big this space is. And I wanted to include a lot of those little details that were going to make the image fun to look at. All of the different board games, the cactus cooler, the pizza box, the catan board, the KOBOLD CARRYING THE CATAN EXPANSIONS… I wanted this to be something that if you looked at for an hour, you could still find something new the next day.

And finally, after a total of TWELVE days of about 12 hours each… It was finished. The dragon was scaled, the hot chips were spilled, the games her in place, and the Kobold was named and descending. It was a lesson in planning and anticipation of detail for me. It didn’t really make sense to me why it was taking so long, I do 2 day large scale murals all the time. Finally my husband had lovingly mentioned to me that a big part of my chalk murals is concession of detail to time and elements. Because I ONLY have 2 days and because the ground a lot of the time is unforgiving, I let a lot of things go to create as complete of a piece as I can in the time allowed. I didn’t do that with this piece, and instead kind of forced myself in the opposite direction. Taking the time to make it as perfect and stunning as possible.
So thanks for reading this if you did, it was awesome to make, and I hope you get to see it in person. If not, enjoy some more images of the details from the mural.
Cheers!

bek blog

mural at sword and board games in santa cruz