Without realising our blunder we ran into our first trouble. By publishing photos of the mural in our online gallery at Webshots. Online we found that we had broken copy right by incorporating the Winnie the Pooh images. We were very politely informed that they had to be removed and this left us with a very patchy design. Not to worry! We continued on with a very loose conceptual design and new images were incorporated every day, such as the symbol of Alcoholics Anonymous (at Lucinda the women attend 12 Step Meetings daily). For a bit of fun we incorporated bees swarming around the sign and turned it into an eCard. We included a caption saying - "As Bees To The Honey Pot - So Are The Days of Our Recovery."
That kept us amused for a while! Honey seemed to become a favourite source of inspiration as you can see from the picture of "The Honey Eater."
As they joked along the women decided to add a picture of the co-coordinator of the house. Being a counsellor she has a mobile phone perpetually glued to her ear. We portrayed her as such.
Unfortunately that image had to be removed as well. A more general "Birds & Bees" type recovery theme developed. Because residents had gained so much pleasure from 'Babee' a little possum that had been rescued from the cat, the images gravitated towards a more Aussie Bush theme filled with cute creatures. This reflected the general pre-occupation of the healing community at the time. By copying images from our subscription to Arttoday and using them for a guide we avoided any risk of copyright problems. We adapted the pictures and painted them onto the wall with white paint. This was a useful way of blocking the shapes against the background colours so that we had blank white shapes to paint 'in to'.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Jo Murphy's Murals topic, please visit the Discussions page.