Painting the Placentia Library for summer

My dad and I painted the front doors to the Placentia Library, where I work at, for the library’s summer reading program! My dad is an amateur (and really good!) artist and I helped, and it took about seven hours on Friday.

The summer reading program, taking the slogan “Dream Big: Read” with a night-time and dreams theme, begins tomorrow and lasts until August 18. The library has story-time programs for kids, movie showings for adults, and children, teen and adult reading programs.

We used tempera paint, which is commonly used for window painting. We painted a white layer on each of the seven panels, and then added blue layers on the left panels and orange on the right panel. Each of the panel has a border paint as well (dark blue for the left panels, yellow for the middle panels and red for the right panel). We used rollers (pictured below) for the large strokes, and finer brushes for the smaller strokes (like lettering).

This is the first time I have painted -or done anything involving art- in a while, and I’m glad I did! I think I’ll draw some more this summer. Since I’ve been reading a lot of comic books (currently Marvel’s Deadpool and Cable), I’m inspired to draw some superheroes and X-Men characters.

My dad did all the lettering because that is the hardest thing to do in window painting (because you have to have precise strokes), but I did a lot of the stars, shading, backgrounds and faded edges. As you can see (left), I’m painting the stars in red. The adult program has a classic Hollywood theme (and the library is decorated like1940s  Holllywood with the end of the bookshelves having celebrity names and film motifs), so we drew a red carpet and red stars along with a yellow background for a simplistic yet classy look.

This is probably my favorite panel (my dad painted it all except I shaded the moon orange):