The latest mural installed in Chemainus will probably look familiar. That’s because it was formerly located on the side of the old Chemainus fire hall, with slight differences.
Last Friday, the Chemainus Festival of Murals Society, with workers from Leon Signs in Duncan assisting, installed Mural No. 3, Steam Train on Bridge over Chemainus River, on the Willow Street Telephone Building.
The original mural painted in 1982 by Paul Marcano was located on the side of the former Visitors Centre/fire hall building that was demolished two years ago. Telus provided a grant to the Society to help with the project.
Society member Art Carlyle has been working on the project for a while.
“There were lots of problems reproducing the mural,” he explained. “I ended up reproducing the artist’s original concept painting that is about 14”x 16.” There were blanks where the building windows would be. In order to reproduce this image large enough, I copied the painting with eight images that were stitched together to make a 14 gigabyte file.
“Besides Photoshop work to fill in the blanks, filters and sharpening were applied as well as saturation adjustments. The file was then split into three files for three 4’x8’ panels. The files were printed on plastic film and laminated by Leon Signs in Duncan.”
The final product was an 8’x12’ mural.
There will be some other new and replacement murals upcoming as well.
A new banner on the Welcome Tower at the foot of Henry Road was also installed last week to replace an older, damaged banner.
