The Living Seas "Mural"

EPCOT Center had some of the most beautiful mural work, most of which survives in some form today (the caveman/spaceman in Spaceship Earth, the tile mosaic at the entrance to The Land).

Ever since Nemo and his Friends moved into The Living Seas, the entryway has looked like this:

(Image from this site.)


But for 20+ years, the entryway looked like this:

(Image from this site.)


Even though sunsets and sunrises can be slightly cheesy, I loved the colors in this and I really liked the 3D "piecing" to emphasize the sun's colors reflecting and bouncing off of the rippling ocean surface.  Yesterday I created a piece of artwork inspired by this original EPCOT mural.

I did not recreate it exactly; aside from not having a chunk of wall big and long enough to do it justice, I am trying to steer clearly of a literal remake of everything exactly as it was.  I don't have that level of skill or resources, and I'm trying to make an inspiration house, not a monument.

So here's how I did it.  This piece cost around $30 to make.  If you want to spend more, go for it, but I don't think it's necessary (save the $ to make other projects!).

The canvas was most of the expense at $20.  It's around 18 x 24; the wall where it's going obviously determined the size of the canvas.   I used two shades of blue acrylic paint and put some loose 'wave' shapes on it.  As this is going to be a background, it doesn't have to be too precise.

I knew all of those years of drawing M-birds in elementary school would pay off some day.

I bought the canvas at an art store; everything else was bought at your local crafting emporium.  (You can get canvas there too; I just wasn't sure when I was at the craft store if I was going to use one, and the art store is closer to me.)  I grabbed some balsa wood strips (all around a dollar each) in various widths.  Balsa is best for this because it's lightweight; real wood is going to add up in weight very quickly, and you don't want to have to brace it and anchor it so it doesn't rip out of the wall.

You can obviously paint directly on the wall, but to get the 3D effect, you'll need to attach the pieces to the wall too.  My goal is to make stuff that can go with me in the event of a move, and I don't want to do too much to the wall surfaces directly.  Repairing walls can be a huge pain.  But YMMV.

Celebrate the magic of cheap wood.

I used acrylic paint to color each strip a different shade for the 'sunset.'  I didn't bring a picture to match the colors exactly-- I just eyeballed it and took my best shot.

The color scheme of a track suit.  In 1981.

The five tubes of acrylic paint cost 99 cents each.  The shop had an insane sale on sponge brushes, so I picked up a dozen for a dollar.  They're not radically more expensive at regular price, though.

The balsa strips suck up paint and dry pretty quickly.  I cut them into random lengths-- some very short to make the rippling-light effect.  I've never worked with balsa and damn, is it soft.  Cutting them is easy, almost too easy.  Be careful as you could tear it and make jagged edges.  The paint also comes off anywhere your saw so much as touches the wood.  I cut with a tiny crafter's hacksaw, but that's not necessary; a pair of wire cutters would probably do just as well, even better perhaps because they won't pull at the composite and shred it.

I used a fine-grain sandpaper (220, left over from a recent floor refurb) and evened off the edges of the balsa bits.  Don't sweat cutting them perfectly straight; balsa sands really easily, so you can even out the edges while you smooth it.  Then I touched up the bare-wood ends with a matching paint color.  You could, obviously, cut the wood first and then paint it all up at once, which probably makes more sense to do.

Pic taken pre-sanding and pre-retouching.  You can see how jaggedy the edges can get.

I laid out the pieces on the now-dry canvas (I gave it a couple of hours to dry) to create something resembling an abstract sunset, then used Gorilla Glue to adhere the pieces to the canvas.  A little glue goes a long way, especially with balsa, but cheap wood will have some warping here and there, so a couple of pieces may need some extra coaxing to lie flat.

And here she is:

Again, if you want to hew more closely to the original mural, go for it.  This isn't a piece that would be hung under a spotlight; it's more the visual version of background music, and it's going on a fairly 'dead wall' in the kitchen.  There, it'll provide a little interest, but isn't going to dominate the room.  If you think about the original EPCOT pavilion design, they had the live water effect on the pavilion sign, which drew your attention; the mural on the back wall was really a companion piece to the main draw of that repeated, crashing wave.

I don't dislike the changes that the Nemo reboot brought to the mural, but now there isn't that balance that used to be there, between the serene mural and the unexpected violence of the breaking wave.  Now it's a bunch of squawking seagulls (don't get me wrong, it's cute) and the busy-ness of the movie critters all over the mural space.  It's not bad, but the tug-of-war between calm and chaos is lost.