During our August 2009 trip to Bonaire Joan undertook a project that she was hoping to do for a long time, the stenciling of an undersea mural in our condo Sand Dollar.
The project began long before we arrived in Bonaire. Joan spent many hours searching the internet for the stencils she would need to complete the project.
Her research would eventually lead her too two places. Stencil Kingdom in London where she purchased the scuba diver, coral reef and fish stencils. The turtle and sea horse stencils, along with the stencil paint, were purchased from Wall to Wall Stencil in Indiana.
On our first full day on island we went to Krioyo Paint Bonaire to pick a base color and other supplies. Looking at the samples on the wall we picked a nice blue. When we turned it over and saw the name of the sample we knew we made the right choice, it was called Ocean.
Returning to the condo Alan taped all the edges and began applying the base coat while Joan cut in all the corners. After the base coat was applied Joan’s creative end took over on the project. Joan would dip the brush in blue paint and then in white paint applying that to the wall creating the watery wavy effect that you see.
The following day after all that had dried, and for the next six days after that (except one day off for our 26th wedding anniversary) Joan would dive in the morning for inspiration and then spend six hours in the afternoon stenciling the mural.
Stencil paint takes time to dry before you can seal and protect it. For advice on that we went to Janice Huckaby at Jan Art. She told us we would be fine letting it sit until our next trip and would also have the spray sealer that we would need when we return to our condo at Sand Dollar in Bonaire.
We estimate that Joan spent more than forty hours working on the project, while Alan spent about ten hours helping and the rest of the time looking for an afternoon dive buddy.
Update February 2010:
As Joan worked on her undersea mural last August she realized that we had under- estimated the size of the wall and amount of fish stencils that we would need. The other problem was that we could not find any Caribbean angelfish stencils.
We wondered if could have a custom stencil made from one of Alan’s photos. We started searching the web and found Carol at Designer Stencils in Delaware who said she could help us.
We started with Alan’s angelfish photo, silhouetted it, and sent it to our friend Tom Reczek who converted it to a three layer illustrator file that Designer Stencils would use to make the stencils.
The six photos here show Alan’s original photo, the silhouetted version, and the illustrator separation. We then sent that to Carol at Designer Stencils, who made two custom three layer stencils for us at a very reasonable price. The final three photos show how it worked on the wall.
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