"Lava," He Said (painting a wall mural for my nephew's bedroom)

A few years ago my sister and her husband built a new house and gave their son the option of choosing a theme for his new bedroom; he was about 5. "Lava!" he said. Not exploding volcanoes or fire, just lava. AND, it must flow from the wall and over his bed.

Now, I am not one to turn away a challenge, in fact I really enjoy the opportunity to 'find a way' to get what I want (or, in this case, what he wanted). I did some digging and found about 10 photos of 'just' lava on the internet that I thought would work, and had even found a great example of comic book illustration that cartooned lava flowing over a dying planet a la the old Sherwin Williams paint logo ("Cover the Earth!"). He loved the comic example and ultimately we ended up with a plan for a spacey exploding planet with lots of lava. My sister's caveat: have more (existing) yellow walls than mural, please.

My sister and I started this in the fall, for 5 weekends we'd work 1 day on a new layer or part, and we finished up just in time for Thanksgiving. In retrospect, I would have liked to make the planet much larger since it's practically hidden behind the bed, but what we ended up with was still very cool. Unfortunately, we were so excited to finish up (and also very tired!) that we went and moved the bunk bed in place before I remembered to take a photo of the finished planet. If you go to the actual photo, you should be able to zoom in enough to see some of the detail . . . I'll try to remember to take a few new shots next I'm visiting.

**Update 07/16/08: more detailed shots added to the slideshow!**

Take a peek at the slideshow!