Love Letter to Denton

- By Isabella Quintanilla

Denton is a vibrant city with many unique qualities, and the artwork all around the city perfectly represents this. One particularly stunning piece is a mural located on the side of a hardware store just off North Locust Street.

The owner of the restaurant right next door commissioned two local artists from the Denton area, Melanie Little Gomez and Des Smith, to create a mural inspired by the 1950s, Monty Python, pigs, and Denton.

Melanie and Des had never done a mural before this, let alone something so intricate, but they loved the challenge and jumped at the opportunity to create this amazing work of art.

Before they started painting, the artists had to figure out what all they wanted to incorporate, where to place all the characters, and how to get those ideas onto the wall.

“My mother, who’s a collage artist, came over with a bunch of what we had drawn and cutouts, and we all just kind of played until we got this collage that felt like Denton,” said artist Melanie Little Gomez.

Once they knew what they wanted to do they had to prime the entire wall and then use a projector to create the outline for the mural. They then went in and added all the little details that make this piece so interesting

If you look closely, every single object and character in this mural was created with such creativity and close attention to detail. No matter how many times you look at it, you’ll always find something small that you never noticed before.

On top of this, the wall is 91 feet long and 16 feet tall — hence why it took the two artists 6 months to complete.

“We’d just come out at dawn and paint this thing until the sun hit us, and we would just paint all day every day and just try to make this thing come together,” said artist Des Smith.

But despite the long and challenging process, Melanie and Des both said the support and love they received from the community encouraged them to keep going and the mural has become their love letter to Denton.

The mural is located across from the Juicy Pig Barbecue and you can learn more about the artists behind it and the work that they’ve done at www.melanielittlegomez.com.