Atlanta’s newest museum, celebrating college football, asked me if I’d be interested in doing a 12-by-24 foot mural of the all-time top 14 college football coaches. I’d never done one before and it sounded fun, so I said yes. I imagined spending weekends downtown at the museum, climbing scaffolds, with brushes and paint, trying to figure out how to bring each coach to life.
The head of the museum told me that since the mural would be at eye level and they expected lots of visitors, they wanted the mural printed, so if some kid came by with a magic marker and put moustaches on the coaches, they could just reprint a new one.
That meant drawing each coach, approximately 8 1/2 by 11 inches, from the comfort of my office. I Googled photos of each guy and viewing them from my computer screen, worked to capture good likenesses, using the same fine-point black pens that my editorial cartoons are drawn with. I don’t pencil anything in first. I go directly to ink, so the black-and-white original drawings of the coaches are full of whiteout from having to be redrawn.
After finishing each, they were scanned into the computer at a very high resolution, so they could be enlarged for the mural. Next I colored each using Photoshop. When finished, they were emailed to a design firm along with my layout for where and how each coach should be positioned.
Being kind of old school, it seemed amazing to be able to complete an entire mural on my computer.
The mural’s bright and colorful, so there’s a cartoonlike element about it, but each coach is drawn in a realistic way, so I think it turned out kind of cool.
When you visit the College Football Hall of Fame, view the mural closely. Somewhere on it, I drew myself.
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