My first mural with spray paint

I recently finished my first ever mural painted with spray paint! It is located at the Ultrasolar Jardín Comunitario de Carolinas, a community garden in my neighborhood in Alicante, Spain.

I've wanted to learn how to work with spray paint for a while, as it will allow me to bring my ideas to life on a larger scale and into public places. I love street art and admire the way a colorful mural can transform a space, so I'm excited to be able to share my weird, surreal art with the world in this way.

Painting this mural was definitely a learning experience for me. Though I've painted with oils for years, I've never before used spray paint and worked on such a large scale, and the technique is completely different. One of the major differences I noticed was the speed at which you need to work: with oils, I paint very slowly and deliberately, but with spray I had to move quickly and smoothly to avoid the buildup of paint in one place (and drips). This can make it difficult (for the inexperienced spray painter like me, at least) to paint precise shapes or small details. For this reason, the planet was the hardest part of the mural. I sketched the circle onto the wall with a compass made of string, but keeping the planet perfectly round as I outlined and then filled it in with spray paint was very difficult. In contrast, one of the advantages of spray paint is how easy it is to blend colors and create gradients. I found it easiest and most satisfying to paint organic forms like the squid and asteroid due to the facility of blending that the spray allowed. I definitely felt I was able to improve my technique and control over the course of working on the mural.

Overall, I loved the experience and can't wait to paint more large-scale murals!