Above: Full mural details, swipe right to read the whole thing!

In the summer of 2019, I was invited to create a large-scale piece for the MICE art show. I’ve displayed work at the MICE show in previous years, and in 2018 hung one of my large ink drawings from the Can You Please Stop project. That piece was 15 feet long and took up half the wall; in 2019, they offered me the full wall! The only requirement: Since MICE is a comics show, it had to involve visual storytelling.

I very briefly considered a more conventional panel layout – just scale it up! – but that seemed like it would be a waste of the format. Better to do a free-flowing single image that couldn’t simply exist on a page in the same way as it does across the wall.

The Garden is actually a story that I had initially earmarked to produce as a zine. The original concept was a small series of books of my childhood nightmares, those vivid and visceral fears that don’t seem to come to me as an adult. (Now all my bad dreams are stress dreams, my waking tension bleeding into my times of rest.) As a kid I made little picture books, thread-bound printer paper pages with cereal box cardboard covers. I dearly love small book objects that fit snugly in your hand, and this was how I meant to hold my old nightmares. Instead, I blew this one up to a huge scale, unconquerable by a single person.

The process:

1. Design – I started by asking myself a very simple question: What do I like to draw that will look good blown up huge on a wall? Everyone knows I’m obsessed with drawing hands, so there we go, that was my central point. I had to mess around with text scale test printing, to make sure everything would be legible 8 ft up. To check for scale, I overlaid my big ink drawing from 2018, which had taken up about half the length of that same wall while it was installed.

2. Drawing – The thing that got me most excited about being a beta tester for the Adobe Fresco app was the vector brushes! I like to play with scale, and being able to use them like normal inkers on my iPad was a revelation. I can be very precious and precise with my linework at times, I’ve never painted a mural, and I don’t live in Boston, so the solution I came to was to draw the whole long strip in vectors, and cut it out on a large-format vinyl cutter to apply to the wall. That way I got to do all my little details without freaking out over messing up with paint, or having to deal with a fear of falling off a ladder while working. The toughest part: Figuring out how to replicate some of the shading I’d done in the pencil stage, since it had to be made of solid shapes for the vinyl stage, and couldn’t be too many tiny detached textures.

3. Physical production – SVA has a facility called the Visible Futures Lab, a makerspace full of cool machines I want to learn how to play with. One of those cool machines is the big printer-cutter thing (a very technical name, I assure you). I fed my vectors into it in sixteen separate pieces, it spat out the cut pieces, and then I sat around for hours peeling negative space adhesive away and applying transfer tape.

4. Installation – Over the course of a weekend, and sixteen hours in total, it got up there. I had to call in my brother and six friends, who swapped out with each other like they were taking shifts, to be my second pair of hands, and then did some finicky finishing touches with an X-acto and some extra strips of vinyl.