Hansen celebrates her wedding anniversary in August and has already "hinted" to her husband that the perfect gift would be a ladder—with a paint tray!
An aspiring science illustrator, Hansen laughs when asked if she believes her anniversary wish will come true. “There’s a good chance,” she says knowingly.
Her husband served as Man Friday, helping Hansen with the precise measurements and surface preparation necessary to create an imposing mural of dark brown silhouettes that portray, among others, a nine-feet tall wooly mammoth, a flightless, non-flying “terror bird” (diatryma), a rhino and bats with wingspans of three to four feet.
"The whole idea is to convey size, to show how big these prehistoric creatures really were," says Museum Director Melissa Zielinski.
While pursuing a concentration in science illustration, Hansen learned about the Natural History Museum’s highly valued internships from Art Professor Teresa Stanley. It took Hansen six weeks to complete the mural drawings when Zielinski commissioned the project in August, 2007. Committee approval was completed last January, but inclement weather and final exams prevented Hansen from brandishing her paint roller until the closing days of May.
She completed the mural in a month, based on spaces she had mapped out for each silhouette. The creatures chosen for illustration were not a foregone conclusion. Size, impact and visual recognition were key criteria. For example, Hansen and Zielinski considered using a prehistoric whale, but realized it would look as if it were flying, not swimming, on a background of uniform color.
Hansen’s drawings measured one foot by four feet, inscribed on engineering graph paper. After nightfall, she and her husband used an overhead projector to shine the images on the museum’s north wall. Wielding a long piece of floor trim as a stick, they marked off one foot increments up to 10 feet. This ensured that the scales remained accurate as they copied the drawings from the overhead transparencies onto the wall. The projector enabled her to trace the outlines with a graphite pencil onto the surface in the dark, then return in the day time to paint the figures.
Hansen says one of her biggest "lessons learned" is that a large-scale mural is definitely a team effort. Heretofore, she labored solo as an artist, but murals require shared effort. The museum project gave her "a whole new respect for the murals I see around town here and in Eureka. To work outdoors on that scale and achieve the color, the depth and the detail—and then cope with North Coast weather!—well, it’s just phenomenal."
Hansen is ready to have at it again, as long as she has a mentor. “There must be specific tricks they use, working with giant grids and traversing a scaffold. I don’t have the experience or know-how to take something like that on by myself,” she says.
Delighted with the compliments she has received from the first young observers of her new mural, Hansen smiles as she recalls two girls, about fourth or fifth grade, who confided to her in the gravest, hushed tones, “You know, this is what they really look like,” they declared. “That’s the size they really are!”
Hansen is uncertain what she will do when she completes her degree in another year—she has a great deal of teaching experience—but she is already at work on illustrations for the museum’s bee exhibits. It is clear her success with the mural is an inspiration to her as well as the museum’s visitors.