This mural is above the entrance to the restaurant in the hotel. The people in the painting are all local characters who have been patrons to the hotel over the years and includes the owner and his father. It was Tony Blair’s constituency and as a regular he got to be in it too. From a sketch design that gave me the character positions, I took photographs of everyone in the basic positions, with the lighting as consistent as I could get, and worked the design up to full size. I had to adapt most of the figures to get a ‘chiaroscuro’ effect, which alludes to the paintings of Caravaggio.
