Becoming Mural at Sacramento State

This mural is a collaboration with students in the McClatchy High School Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program who are becoming adults and creatives. Select student artwork, inspired by the Becoming prompt, is digitized and simplified around the word “BECOMING”. Working together on a college campus, led by a working artist, helps them to become the next iteration of themselves, whether that’s a professional artist or a Sacramento State student.

Learn more about the project from Sac State.

Learn more about VAPA at CKM.

The Finished Collaborative Mural

Painting the Mural with Students

Color-by-numbers lines

Tracing the projection at night

Deciphering my notes on paint day 1

Final details

Big thanks to everyone who came out to help paint and trace the mural!

Axel, Caroline, Chloe, Emily, Eddie, Gemma, Hannah, Jillian, Novella, John, Leta, Lillian, Lilly, Linda, Malia, Marvin, Matilda, Mckenna, Rowan, Talia, and Tim.

The Original Student Artwork Submitted

A huge thank you to all the students who submitted artwork. I tried to use all of the images and to stay true to your imagery. Obviously, the work was changed quite a bit in the simplification, re-coloring, tracing, and painting.

Caroline M.
Axel C.
Kaitlyn G.
Virginia T.
Faith H.
Matilda M.
Ruby C.
Leta M.
Nina C.
Yaohong C.
Jillian P.
Judah M.
Vivian W.
Sabrina S.
Hannah D.

Details

If you are thinking about painting your own mural here are some details that may help you.

Professionals charge between $8-30 per square foot.
This wall was approximately 30 x 7 feet, thats 210 square feet.
The project paid $1,000. Thats $4.76 per square foot. The call for proposals was open to all students, staff, and alumni of Sac State.
I purchased 5 gallons of high quality outdoor acrylic paint costing around $300. I have a lot of left over paint, but thats better than running out! I already had a large number of brushes in many sizes, drop cloths, gloves, a wagon, a projector, plastic containers and other tools.
At 35.5 hours of my time, $1000 fixed fee, $300 for supplies, my hourly rate was $19.71 per hour. I will be donating $300 to CkM VAPA Boosters in thanks for their help (so my hourly rate was even lower).
Note: My hourly rate fluctuates! All projects vary in budget, scope, complexity and length. In general, my hourly rate is $25-125 per hour.

Time

I use Harvest for time tracking on all my projects. Even though this was a fixed fee project, I wanted to know how long I really spent making the project happen. Some extra time was wasted by me – I misread an email and had to update the text a couple times.

Date	Task	Notes	Hours
1/29/24	Class Prep	design	0.5
2/1/24	Class Prep	design	1
2/13/24	Communications	meeting at CKM	0.5
3/4/24	Class Prep	design	3
3/5/24	Class Prep	design	0.5
3/11/24	Class Prep	design	1
3/12/24	Class Prep	design	1
3/13/24	Communications	Final design	3
3/23/24	Class Prep	final line drawing, buy paint	1
3/23/24	Class Prep	final line drawing, buy paint	2.5
3/23/24	Communications	meeting at the wall	1.5
3/25/24	Class Prep	design	1
3/26/24	Mural Painting	tracing	2
3/28/24	Mural Painting	painting	6
3/30/24	Mural Painting	painting	7
4/2/24	Mural Painting	Finishing Up	4
	TOTAL		35.50

Design Versions In Illustrator

I used Illustrator to design the mural. To simplify the images I took them into Photoshop and posterized (reduced the number of) the colors down to 12-16 colors. I then brought them into Illustrator and used the trace image tool, simplifying the colors again to 8-12. I then expanded the appearance of the images so they were vector and scalable. At this step I worked on the collage and text quite a bit.

From there I spent a lot of time recoloring the images to use shades of magenta, yellow and cyan. My plan was to unite the art and limit paint costs through a limited palette.

Once I had a limited color palette I selected all instances of that color and filled the shapes with a pattern I created showing the number assigned to that color. That’s how I got the shapes filled with the number of the color.