Painting Coffee Cups

I started the coffee cup portion to my ever expanding wall mural.

Finally, I know. It's taken me forever to continue the work on it.

I blame the economy......and Spiro Agnew.

I don't know what I'm saying.

The real problem was that I had decided what to do with the coffee cups, but I think I realized that it was the wrong plan. Somewhere in my mind, I didn't want to start because I knew it wasn't right.

So, I kept rolling the idea around in my head until I finally got the right picture.

See, I knew that I wanted 6 cups, different in shapes. They're signifying the 6 in our family. I was going to 'theme' each cup to a family member, but decided against it. I think this is part of my hesitancy in starting the project. It just wasn't right.
I think it would have been terribly difficult, the themes wouldn't look necessarily right together. And as the kids age, they will change. So, I decided that I still liked the idea of having one for each of us, but that can be the extent of it.

So, there you are.

I wanted bright colors, but didn't want to do an orange cup because of the owl.

So, I picked purple, blue, cranberry as the main ones. Maybe a gray or pink one. I thought of a caramel colored one, and this is what I came up with.

It kinda went peachy with some rusty highlights and caramel lowlights.

I like it.

I was bummed I couldn't really do a green one. But come on, the wall is green and the leaves are green. Even if I lime-greened it (which really wouldn't work with the color scheme) it would look a little over-greened.

I also finished the purple mug. One of the best things about painting on a dark wall is that I can just sketch in the drawings in chalk.

Right on the wall.

This really helps. Because with a wall mural, size is difficult to read. You really have to sketch it and step back and see how it looks. I do that a lot when I'm painting and I can't change the shape of it once it's on the wall. I can change the color and shading, but not the size. Unless I make it bigger.

So, I picked my 6 branches and sketched my 6 cups and then stepped back and made adjustments. I was surprised that I wanted them bigger than I planned. I ended up adjusting 2 cups to be larger.

Here's the purple. I accented it with some yellow. I think it's bright and vibrant. Love it!

Here's the two finished cups on the tree. I think later on, once they're all done, I may add some steam whirls above the cups and maybe some coffee spilling out. Not sure yet, though.

I may try to take more detailed photos of one of the cups for you guys. It's kind of cool to see how it goes from the chalk sketch to the finished project.

What do you think?