Wall Art at Flats in Luxor

Anyone spending time in Egypt will notice that many of the houses are decorated with brightly coloured murals. These can be of a variety of subjects. On the outside of a private home these came be a description of the householders trip to Mecca, scenes of the journey together with the sites of Mecca commemorate their Hajji or pilgrimage. On business premises these are more often scenes of Ancient Egypt done to entice passersby to the premises. Well we are as guilty as the next and recently had one of our walls decorated. Actually to be strictly accurate it wasn’t our wall at all but our neighbours. He had built his house and the back wall of it faced our property and was directly over our swimming pool. A view of mud bricks and concrete pillars is not very aesthetically please when you are lying by the pool so my husband approached him and proposed we render and paint it. Of course he was delighted that we wanted to improve his building and agreed at once.

Firstly of all we wanted a slightly different picture from the normal Hatshepsut’s temple or Tutankhamen’s mask so delving into my books I came across the scene from Pashedu's tomb at Deir el Medina. It shows Pashedu drinking form the river in the after world under a date palm tree. Well being as it was going above the swimming pool and there was a date palm in front of the building it was perfect.

I gave the painter a line drawing and a coloured picture and from that he created our picture some 2 stories high. He drew grid lines on the paper and then using masking tape and huge sheets of paper he made a full size girded paper. On this he reproduced square by square the design on the A4 sheet. Then he went over every line with a toothpick making holes. He then hung the paper up against the wall and using a bag of powdered blue dye he puffed over all the tiny holes leaving small dots behind the paper. He them removed the paper and joined up the dots and then started painting. It was fascinating watching him at work and I think you will agree the finished article looks great.