Weyburn Arts Council announces mural design winners

Voting results are in for the Weyburn Arts Council's mural design contest, with the top three coming out of more than 600 votes.

"It was absolutely great to see so much public involvement in deciding this," said Regan Lanning, Curator of the Weyburn Art Gallery and City representative for the Weyburn Arts Council.

The top three designs were created by Leena Honig, Krystal Glowatski, and Delaine Castle, who will see their winning designs painted onto the baseball diamond dugouts at Jubilee Park.

Leena Honig and her mural design

Delaine Castle and her mural design

Krystal Glowatski and her mural design

"We're going to be painting two of the designs hopefully this summer," Lanning noted. "When we are able to paint the designs depends on a number of things. It depends on the weather. We were going to paint a different design over May long, but it was just so cold at night that it was too cold for us to be working, and then it rained for the rest of the weekend and cold temperatures and rain are not really good for the getting the paint to cure. So we had to cancel our plans. But we're hoping to get started on that one very soon and then throughout the summer, we will be painting hopefully two of the three and then the next one will be painted next summer."

She said rain is the biggest issue. 

"Wind actually can help with the drying and the paint does dry pretty quick, it's just the curing that takes longer, but we have to do the outlining at night. We use a projector so that we can get it faithful to the actual design that was submitted, so we do that at night in the park under the cloak of darkness."

The latex paint they'll be using for the murals, Lanning said, is made to last.

"It's actually a really expensive, high quality paint, and it's by Golden Paint Works and it's different than like exterior house paint because this is more like artist-grade, and it's blendable. With house paint, if you have a red house paint and you have a blue house paint and you mix those together, you're not going to get a purple. With these, you actually do. So they're like an actual artistic quality and they are formulated for outdoors. So they are good to minus 40 and good to plus 40." 

While the paint is costly, the Weyburn Arts Council had previously purchased some thanks to a grant from the Weyburn Credit Union. Now, they have run out and have used some of the WAC's funds to get more.

Each of the artists were awarded $250, with the money having been bequeathed to the Weyburn Arts Council by the late Gloria Onstad. Read more HERE.

Follow the Weyburn Arts Council and Weyburn Art Gallery on Facebook HERE.