How It All Began
I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy writing. I actually quite like it. I’ve kept a journal since I was young. I enjoy sending and receiving letters from friends and family, and in the mix of my genes, I like to think I’ve inherited my fathers’ love for storytelling and the written word. While this may not be the most intriguing, amusing, or repeatable story out there, I do believe that everyone has a story worth telling, and I plan to write about this one.
My name is Helen, I have always been an artist, and I’ve never liked the idea of living in California. Detested it, actually. I don’t like earthquakes and prefer the snow to sun, which made this state of “it’s always 70 and sunny, with a side of shaking” incredibly low on my places to live. I find it funny looking back at my younger self, swearing I would never move here, knowing now that being in California was inevitable. This is where my story begins.
My love of sculpting, creature design, illustration and an interest in film had Hollywood written all over it. Nearly everyone in my life could’ve bet that I’d end up on the west coast, but it took me nearly five years after I’d set myself on this path to realize it for myself. During college, in the delightfully cold city of Rochester, New York (where snow was abundant) I found myself on the path of wanting to be a creature concept designer, a sculptor for studios in the Special Effects Makeup world, and a dire need to go on Face Off and show the world what I was capable of (I assure you, at that point I knew nothing and thought I could compete without even knowing how to warm clay). I graduated, interned for multiple makeup companies for several years, and after a trip to California, realized I needed to go to school for SFX Makeup. August of 2018 had me officially moving to California, and COVID of 2020 had me officially moving back home. I thought I was done with California at that point, but I had three more months of school still left. When the time came, I went back…and found myself on the set of what would become three television show credits for me. The Mandalorian 3, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew became my everyday life. I was a mold maker for the prosthetics and masks worn on the shows. I even got to sculpt and paint a few of the pieces seen in a couple of episodes. Life was good, but the artist in me was starving. There wasn’t a lot of creative freedom in mold making. To combat this, I began to think about what could possibly fill that need. From those thoughts, a muralist was born.
The nice thing about set work is that there is downtime between shows. You have days, weeks, or months off at a time, the perfect way to start a side gig without committing everything to it and relying on it for your entire income. My opportunity arose, and a five month break appeared. With the words “Go do something you enjoy until the next show starts,” I set off to find my creative outlet. Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to find once I put pen to paper and made a list of what would be cool to do. Something you should know about me - I’ve always loved painting big. I get that from my mom. She always told me her canvases in college were never big enough until her professor put two doors together. Apparently, my poor professor had to give me a whole wall before I felt satisfied. While fun to make, murals at that point in my life didn’t hold as much sway as the glamour of Hollywood, so for nearly 10 years, they took a back seat. Don’t get me wrong, I still painted them. I painted my walls, friends walls, in my hometown community and three at the studio I worked in for the Star Wars shows. But when the opportunity came, I thought why not? Why not try to start my own company and paint murals on the side for fun? How hard could it be?
WELL. It was not as easy as I wanted it to be. But certainly not as hard as it could’ve been! I started building a portfolio, offering murals to friends and family if they housed and fed me (I love food, so this was a great deal for me). I did all of the paperwork to start a company in California, made a website, cursed my college self for not paying attention in business class, and came up with a name I liked, combining my love for the outdoors and a commitment to create high quality murals. Now all I needed was a paying client.
Sometimes, I really do think I have some pretty amazing luck. And it tends to come from knowing someone who knows someone. My first two clients right out of the gate happened to be California State University, Long Beach, and an aerospace company in SoCal. How cool is that? I was giddy with excitement over both, and proud of what I created for each. While painting these two, I realized I thoroughly enjoyed going to work each day. I found that painting murals was exciting but also quite relaxing and therapeutic to me. Sure, every mural has its problems (I still remember a single leaf that I named George that, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to paint. George the leaf caused a lot of frustration) but overall, the experience seems to me to be the one every artist strives for. And that’s how I knew I wanted to be a muralist.
It shouldn’t have been so easy to make the leap from a very profitable Hollywood job to a highly fluctuating profit and project career, but it was. Peak Murals is about to have its two year birthday in April, and I couldn’t be more proud of what this business has done. The murals I’ve created have brought joy and happiness to homeowners, new parents, communities, and businesses, and that is a truly stunning reward. And it doesn’t hurt when a snack is thrown in there, too!
This is just the beginning of my story, care to come along for the ride?