I designed and painted this 45’ x 8.5’ landscape mural in early 2022 for Detroit's beloved pizzeria, Supino Pizzeria, at their Detroit New Center location. I directly consulted with the owner and interior designer and, after a couple different directions, we decided on a sprawling landscape imagining the hills and trees of their namesake’s Italian comune, inspired by loose colored pencil, goauche, and ink travel sketchbooks and paintings. This was a fun challenge not only with researching the region, but to interpret the style with acrylic interior paint being such a flat medium, allowing myself to experiment with painting loose shapes and drawings of trees and crafting texture using a dry roller brush instead of how tight and precise most murals tend to be at large scale.
In the finished painting, it was incredibly important to have colors that were natural and subtle and blended in with the contemporary zinc, blue-grays and browns that the interior designers and architects had imagined for the rest of the restaurant. Additionally, because the kitchen and bar looks out at the mural, I decided that my audience must be the workers and staff, as they would be the ones that would have to sit with the mural in their view during their shifts. I wanted to create a restful space for their eyes. A bartender later told me that it gave him a calming feeling to look at and that was the highest compliment I could receive.
Rough mock-up using Procreate for iPad
Final illustration completed in Procreate for iPad, drawn to scale, and ready to project and paint.
