What To Do With A White Wall?

My least favourite thing to see around me is a plain white wall. Over the course of years of travelling with a band, which meant a lot of hotels and band houses (you really, really never want to sleep in a band house, trust me) followed by several years of renting apartments and houses, I stared at a lot of white walls. Not something I ever aim to repeat.

To that end, most of the walls in my house sport colour. Lots and lots of colour.

But.

The walls around the top of my stairwell are still white. I have never gotten around to painting them or even hanging pictures on them. It's just one of those spots that doesn't see a lot of use and therefore not much attention. Until now.

So what to do with the white walls around the top of my stairwell?

I had the bright idea of painting a mural up there and spent the next few weeks trying to decide just what, or more like who, would I paint there. Obviously it'd be a superhero or fantasy/sci-fi character. Batman? Superman? Wonder Woman? Spidey? Maybe a group of heroes?

What followed was literally weeks of scouring the web for images, and a ton of indecision and waffling. It needed to be something I'd like seeing there every day, something I could pull off with my level of artistic ability and something that wouldn't take too long and give me a chance to lose focus and wander off to the next project before this one was done. I shuffled through dozens of Batman images, toyed with group images that would have been waaaay to hard to do justice to, seriously looked at some Wonder Woman art work and finally decided on Spider-Man. It's a spot that is above my stairwell so it boiled down to the web-slinger or a similar (Batman, Daredevil, etc.) character that would look right there. I decided on Spider-Man because I love the character, the colours pop and his outfit means that I wouldn't have the added complication of trying to paint a face.

So, inspired by this image from Sam Raimi's Spider man movie franchise:

And this artwork inspired by that same image, from an artist I'd love to credit but don't know the identity of:

I finally started the project. What follows are the steps that I took to create my piece.

Spidey starts out with an outline, filling the eyes with a light grey and the blue areas of Spidey's outfit in a light blue.

Next, a light red to fill in the rest of the outfit.

Add the dark blue shading to the appropriate areas. Also the white highlights in the eyes. Sadly I forgot to take the picture before I'd dismantled the work light for the evening. Thus the less than clear photo. Lesson learned.

Follow that up with dark red shading on the torso, head, arms and boots.

A few corrections to the blue areas, particularly the spot above his belt on the left and the highlight on his leg on the same side.

Red corrections, most notably his lower hand.

The spider symbol. Dark grey to start.

Black highlights on the symbol and around the eyes. I then waffled for over a week.  He looks pretty good, just like this and adding the webbing was a daunting prospect.  So easy to make a mistake and ruin what I'd done.  I seriously contemplated just leaving him as he is here.

Finally, I did commit to the webbing. Just doing this next bit was probably the hardest part of the whole project. Dark grey to start.

Dark grey to finish up all the webbing. The second most difficult night of painting on the whole project.

A second coat of dark grey to the webbing and if you look closely you'll see some added dark grey highlights in the eyes.

Finally a run of black over all the webbing and a touch of it in his eyes. And we're done!

With a little clip and paste, you get to see the whole process in a single image. Since each photo was taken from a slightly different angle as took them, there will appear to be a slight change in the figure's size in each, but that's just a slight perspective skew because to create the animation, each image needs to be the same size.