Murals in the lunchroom at MacLean Power Systems in Addison, Illinois, formerly Reliable Power Products.

Before I corresponded with clients electronically, this last photo was among the most effective sales tools of my mural career:

For several years I used postcards of this shot for promotion, because not only can you see my smiling face but the shot demonstrates two of the skills that have helped me succeed as a muralist: achieving an impressive degree of realism and the ability to disguise wall features like doors that insist on being in the middle of a painted wall. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if I weren’t standing in the doorway you wouldn’t know the door was there.

But those postcards were printed on a rough-matte stock that defied my scanner whenever I tried to create a digital copy I could attach to an email. Luckily for me, my business manager, Alyce, is skilled with Paint Shop Pro and rescued it from the obscurity of my Hopeless Pre-Digital Photos collection.