Creating a (giant) piece of art for the Boston Children’s Museum
This spring I had the immense honor and pleasure of creating an illustration for the Boston Children’s Museum.
The main entrance of the Boston Children’s Museum.
Back in February 2023, BCM put out a call for visual artists, and on a whim, I applied and submitted my portfolio. I truly didn’t think I’d be chosen and was thrilled when I received an email from their team saying that I was one of four artists that they wanted to commission to create a new piece of art for the banners that hang outside their Kidstage theater. If you’ve never been to BCM, Kidstage is their 150-seat theater within the museum that puts on so many wonderful productions throughout the year. (And on a personal note, this whole museum is amazing and beautiful and I want to live there.)
The specs: 36” wide x 84” high. Yep, that’s right…3’ x 7’. I haven’t made a piece of art that big since I painted a CowParade New York cow statue in 2000. This time, though, the final output would be digital.
The museum invited us four artists to gather for an in-person meeting, check out the space, and talk about what we’d make. The artists: Zoe Schein, Yu Cheng, Nile Hennick, and myself. Our project leads at BCM were Vaughan Bradley-Willemann (Senior Director of Arts and Culture) and Lessie Tyson (Arts and Culture Educator). They gave us art direction, talked about the schedule, we got to know each other, toured Kidstage, and took pictures.
Sorry for the terrible photo, but at least the sunshine is creating fun patterns…here’s the entrance to the Kidstage theater within the Boston Children’s Museum. These are the old banners that they wanted us to replace.
BCM was looking for a piece of art from each of us that would be vibrant and have longevity. It could be abstract or representational. It should celebrate the power and joy of play. The museum hoped that between the four of us, we could have a wide variety of representation, both in any people depicted and in the performance-disciplines (ie: music, acting, dance, etc). BCM would art direct and request edits at each stage of the art-creating process to maintain cohesiveness with four very different artists, each with their own distinct style. And with that, we were off!
I went home and started brainstorming and sketching.
I knew I wanted to depict the diversity of the community of Boston, and I love drawing people. Right away I decided that whatever it ended up looking like, I wanted to make sure it was showing lots of kids, of all ages. It’s going to hang in a children’s museum, after all!
brainstorming and sketching and writing notes to myself
I drew many, many, many tiny rough thumbnails, playing around with ideas and composition (so vertical!), making notes to myself, and refining as I went. For the first round of rough sketches I gave the museum several options to choose from… with four artists to juggle, I thought showing options would be helpful, in case they needed a specific discipline to be represented. I also included notes about what I was envisioning each kid would be in regards to age, race, gender, ability, etc. Boston is so diverse, thus the people I draw need to reflect that.
snippets of the rough sketches I submitted for round 1
The powers-that-be chose one, with some slight tweaks. A group of kids of all ages, performing onstage for an audience, each representing a different type of art performance.
I moved on to a tighter pencil sketch, fully fleshing out these kids and what they were doing while incorporating the requested edits (mostly in the form of changing the flying kid into a stagehand peeking out from backstage). At the same time I started planning color and with round 2 I included a color palette with a quick color study.
The chosen concept pencil sketch, with suggested color palette for round 2.
After the approval of the pencil sketch, and with the instructions to brighten the color palette to better coordinate all the banners as a whole, I turned my attention to creating the final art.
The large size of the banner coupled with the required high dpi from the printer (gah!) meant that Procreate wouldn’t work. My options were to either paint the art traditionally (probably with acrylic or watercolor) and photograph it, or create the art as vector with Adobe Illustrator, or if I was feeling lucky… cross my fingers and hope my iMac could handle a massive Photoshop file. I ended up doing a combination of all three… I used Adobe Fresco on my iPad and drew much of the art as vector, then brought that vector file to Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to enlarge it to actual size (Fresco and my iPad couldn’t get it as large as I needed, but creating this part in vector meant I could scale it up without any issues). From there I brought it into Photoshop, scanned in large swathes of watercolor washes I had painted on watercolor paper, then digitally composed everything while adding digital painting on top of the traditional watercolor. At this point I was jumping between using Sidecar to turn my iPad into a second monitor, mirroring my iMac desktop and thus using the full-fledge Photoshop with the Apple Pencil right on the iPad, and working directly on my iMac itself…back and forth, back and forth… (Yikes, this project took a lot of Apple products to make… I promise this isn’t an ad for Apple or Adobe.)
the work-in-progress…
Having the art be digital and in layers was ideal, so it was easy to tweak colors to make sure my banner worked well next to the others. The working file was enormous. Heck, the flattened file at the end was still enormous. But it worked and no smoke came out of my poor computer. Success! After some minor color edits, the banner was complete.
title: It’s Showtime!
artist: Vita Lane
size: 36” x 84”
medium: watercolor and digital
Boston Children’s Museum hosted an unveiling ceremony and reception on June 30th (which I’ll share in another blog post), and the banners are now in their home at the entrance to the Kidstage for all to enjoy. If you’re in the area and have little ones, please pay a visit to the museum and take a look. BCM is a wonderful and exciting resource for families. You and your kids will love it.
photos by Vita Lane