apprenticeship workshop
A Day In the life
It's 6:00 AM.
You roll out of bed, rub the gunk out of your eyes and quickly look for yesterday's pants. Smell your t-shirt, hope it doesn't smell too much like yesterday's paint, get ready for the long day outside, and walk out the door.
You look for a place to sit on the train. You get lucky. You put your headphones in and escape the 45-minute commute before you find yourself in the heart of SoHo. Then, up the stairs into New York streets, there you are.
A mural painter, more specifically, a walldog.
And there they are. Your paint crew, in front of a large wallscape in matching paint-covered clothes. You all have one mission, to recreate the 20 x 10 artwork in your hands into a 1,000 sq foot hand painted mural.
You have 4-5 days.
This is what it takes to be a walldog at Overall Murals.
Remember when your teachers would drill into our heads, "Practice makes perfect." Well, we hate to admit it, but those teachers were right.
We can only grow as a company if we improve our skill set. We need to pause and reflect on where we are to set intentions on where we want to go.
The same applies to our painters.
As the New Year rolled in, we (and as many of us do) set goals for ourselves.
What are your goals for this year? We'll go first!
One of our primary goals is to take our entry-level mural artists and sign painters to the next level through our 2-year Apprenticeship program.
We want to leverage the knowledge and wisdom of our most experienced painters and veteran walldogs and implement a process that improves our apprentice's techniques to become successful muralists.
When we break down the initial fundamentals of a successful walldog, the most common ones are lettering, graphic application, and managing different blends.
Our senior staff worked alongside our production team, where they created a weeklong crash course on teaching and reviewing those fundamentals, starting with our lettering course.
LETTERING
We formalized a lettering workshop to help our apprentices better understand how to best paint straight lines, smooth circles, and lettering forms in general. They learned the paints consistency and how to apply it with the right paint brush to different wall textures to achieve the desired effect of clean brush strokes.
There are a variety of typefaces that can determine what kind of brush our painters will use and their technique.
For example, the tiny text at the bottom of advertisements we tend to ignore is mandatories. The text is so small that it requires a single-stroke approach with the tiniest brush. In our workshop, we outlined the little things like this to prepare each painter for different typeface scenarios on the wall.
There are many, many, many levels to our lettering workshop. People can spend years just mastering lettering, and we want to invest in our newer painters so in time, they can be masters of their craft.
Blending
Our painters took a one-day crash course in blending, where they learned about textured blends, vertical blends, and radial blends. You're probably thinking, why all the different optio