I’m excited to share a project that I just finished last week: a hand-lettered mural for Geary Brewing Co - painted on the door to their Tasting Room in Portland, Maine! I wanted to first share a couple photos of the finished work, then some process photos and insight into something new I tried for this particular project.

This mural had a tight deadline - and considering it required painting outside in April (a bit early for Maine), it was a risky one - especially since it rained almost every day during the week I needed to paint it. But, I got one sunny day - so I backed up my Rav and hunkered down for as long as I could to work on it.

Since I had such a limited amount of time to paint this, I tried something I’ve never done before for a mural project: making stencils. A couple days before I started painting (on a day I was supposed to paint but got rained out!), I made a big Photoshop file of my sketch/the door to-scale, then went over the sketch on my iPad to get higher-resolution lettering in black.

I had prints made of the major elements (like the Geary logo, and ‘NEW ENGLAND’S’), glued each of them to thin cardboard, then painstakingly cut out each letter with an x-acto knife. I figured it would either be a huge waste of time or a huge time-saver and luckily, it worked out great!

I had realized that I just wouldn’t have enough time to lay out the design correctly (exactly as-pictured in my sketch) in pencil or chalk - so luckily it only took me an hour or so to first coat everything with my stencils. After that, I was able to spend the rest of my time adding in the remaining designs, building up the layers and refining the details. There’s something about murals that always seems daunting to me at first - but then so liberating since it’s 100% hand-painted (and a nice break from digital). I’m really happy with how this one turned out!