Post 18 of 29 in the AZ Hive series
None of us are professional artists. So we cheated.
We set up a projector at night, projected the reference image onto the freshly painted shed wall, and traced the outline in pencil. The image: the Scooby Doo gang in full mid-run flight, being chased by giant wasps. We picked the chase scene because it felt active, and the wasps gave us the bee angle without making bees the bad guys.
One of my daughters started the trace, then we took turns. By the time we were done, every line of the mural was on the wall — every character, every wasp, every detail — penciled and ready to paint.
The painting was a team effort. Me and my two daughters, mostly weekends, working in shifts. We started with block colors — flat fields of each character’s iconic palette. Velma’s orange sweater, Shaggy’s green shirt, Scooby’s brown, Fred’s white shirt and blue jeans, Daphne’s purple dress. Wasps in yellow and black. We painted between the lines and let it dry.
Stepping back at that stage, we noticed a problem. The characters looked flat. Cartoon characters, especially the Scooby Doo gang, are defined as much by their black outlines as by their colors. Without the outline, they didn’t quite read.
So we went around the whole mural with a fine brush and black paint and outlined every figure. Sweater seams, hair lines, the texture of Scooby’s collar, the segmented bodies of the wasps. Same effort as the color pass, maybe more — outlines are unforgiving, and any wobble shows.
Once the outlines were in, the mural snapped into place. The flat fields became cartoon characters.
The last step was clear poly. Two coats over the whole mural. The shed end faces the weather year-round, and exterior paint doesn’t last under sun and rain without a topcoat. The poly seals everything and gives the colors a slight sheen that, weirdly, makes the whole thing look more finished than the bare paint did.
That was the build. The poly’s held up against the weather, and the mural has become a small landmark — people who drive by ask about it. We didn’t paint it to be impressive. We painted it because the hives had a Scooby Doo theme and the shed wall was a blank canvas behind them. The side effect is that the apiary now reads as ours from a long way off.
Three evenings, one weekend — March 26–28, 2021. By the end of that weekend, the shed was exactly what we’d imagined on those nights around the dinner table.
Next: Bee Entrances Through the Wall — how six painted entrance icons connect to the hives behind the mural.