Mother Goose

Since the past few days have been spent working on 'business' stuff ( sending out mailings, portfolio updates and creating a blog) I'll show you a project that I worked on last year. It is one of my favorites. This nursery is in a new home in Lowry. The new mom's mom, a designer in Seattle, designed the room and commissioned the work. One of the fabrics used in the crib bedding was a pale pink toile with Mother Goose vineyards. Grandma wanted the characters painted strategically around the room but, the designs on the fabric were too simple to enlarge... they would have looked a bit too cartoony in a large scale. So, I found a book of Mother Goose rhymes which was mine as a child and used the illustrations from it. In addition to painting illustrations from some of my favorite rhymes around the room I also painted the armoire. Since this room was for a little girl I chose to place a female Mother Goose character on each of the four panels... Little Bo Peep, Little Miss Muffet, Mary Mary quite contrary and Jumping Joan. Once painted this piece was hard to part with. I'm glad I got some good photos.

Welcome to the Michelle Frances Blog!

This photo is of my most recent mural project! It was created for a new home in Cherry Creek North. The home has an Italian flavor and, although it is a new home, it has an amazing amount of character. This, in large part, thanks to my good friend Rita Coltrane of Signature Interiors. The homeowner, Rita and I collaborated to design the 'perfect' landscape for the space. This mural of the Tuscan countryside is painted on a wall in the informal dining area. We began with a clear idea of the color palette and the general subject matter but designing the specific details took a few brainstorming sessions. Finally, in order to create a view of a distant landscape we decided to mimic the view from the terrace of an old manor house. I used many different references for different aspects of the mural and, I believe, that they all blended very well. The fall colors were chosen with the rest of the home's color palette in mind. The burnt orange around the mural is the wall color in this room and the adjacent living room and kitchen.



I plan to update this blog every few days with photos of projects I'm currently working on and/ or, ruminations on past projects.

Thank you for taking the time to 'stop in' to visit Michelle Frances Murals.

I would love to hear from you!