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BRACY: The mural project here in the APSC building was initially Dave McDonald's idea, the Associate Provost.

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I decided to take a nontraditional route and introduce it into one of my graphic design classes as a design project.

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The students went through a series of exercises exploring image signs and their role in making messages,

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specifically dealing with the content of the Northwest region, of Monmouth, and of Western campus,

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without yet knowing that the project they were about to embark upon was for the mural.

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The design that was selected was ultimately done by Eric Enright.

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ENRIGHT: My inspiration for this design was taking pictures around campus,

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looking on the Internet for images that represented the Pacific Northwest and Oregon.

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The mural turned out the way I envisioned it. I think it's a little better than the original design.

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We had to adjust a little bit of it to fit inside the building.

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BRACY: Creating a mural of this size is extremely challenging.

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We didn't have the luxury of a space designed for projection of the image and transferring it that way.

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So instead, we created an elaborate grid structure that we could then assign to individual students

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to carefully draw every shape that they saw within the square onto the wall larger size.

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Once the image was drawn on a wall, we moved to the painting process. We had about six different colors pre-mixed,

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so we were ready to assign students to different areas. It was generally paint-by-number at that point,

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because all of the drawn shapes had an initial written in them.

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The paints that were used were wall paint, just acrylic or latex paint that you'd use in your house.

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The brushes were varying sizes of art brushes that we all gathered together from our various supplies.

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It took about two weeks to get all of the paint up there once the initial drawing was on.

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The workforce was made up of volunteers: students from all over campus,

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a lot of art students, and a lot of art faculty helped as well.

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Then we moved to the vinyl process. The lettering that you see is applied vinyl made by a sign company.

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We figured that was a much better solution than hand-rendering all the letters, and the red really ties in with the Western Oregon University identity.

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ENRIGHT: I think the tips that I have for becoming a mural or large print artist would be 

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lots of research and lots of concepts.

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Throwing it all out there, just like any other project, any other creative problem that you have,

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I would start someplace, and then expand your ideas and don't limit yourself to the first thing you come up with.

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