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Maple Ridge artist creates six metre long mural of downtown Vancouver for university

Mural installed at University Canada West
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Maple Ridge artist Elena Markelov worked on a mural of downtown Vancouver for about two weeks. (Special to The News)

A Maple Ridge artist has created a mural of downtown Vancouver that has been commissioned by a private university.

Elena Markelova, who moved to Maple Ridge about two years ago, worked on the mural for about two weeks to create the six metre long, three metre high mural that has been installed at University Canada West’s Vancouver House building, under the Granville Bridge. Some days she would work on it 10-12 hours.

Markelova has been a full-time artist for about five years now, and jumped at the chance to do the mural after the marketing department at the university reached out to her to create and artwork that highlights their campuses.

Markelova mostly works in watercolour and ink.

“Watercolour is my favourite thing in the world. It’s pure magic sometimes,” said Markelova. The way the pigments mix, they create their own beauty on the paper, she said. But, the artist said, you need to plan ahead with water colour.

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the mural, however, was painted using acrylics. However she used the same rules she would use with watercolour – using the white of the wall as the white in the map, diluting paints, and using red and yellow highlights.

This is not a typical mural, explained Markelova.

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“I was really looking forward to actually creating something different and unique,” she said.

It took a week alone to just transfer the sketch to the wall and draw all the buildings. She had to mark the streets to make sure, from an aerial perspective, that everything lined up correctly.

“I was very precise with that,” she said.


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Colleen Flanagan

About the Author: Colleen Flanagan

I got my start with Black Press Media in 2003 as a photojournalist.
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