Karen Carr paints huge murals to go on the walls in museums. These show people who come to the museum what it probably would have looked like in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

	Before she starts painting these murals, Karen has to do a lot of work to find out what things might have looked like. One of the things she does is go to jungles or forests where some of the plants look very similar to the way they looked then. Here she is looking around in El Yunque, the Caribbean National Forest in Puerto Rico.
	Karen does her paintings on a computer, and the first thing she does is make a rough line drawing of each animal in the mural. She checks with the scientists at the museum to make sure she has all the details right.
	Then she draws the animals in groups, as they will be on the final mural. She has to make sure that they are doing the kinds of things that they would be in real life.

Then she draws a huge drawing on her computer, the real size of the final mural. She has to have a very big and powerful computer, because the picture takes up so much room! The real size of the painting might be more than twenty metres long! (Much bigger than your KidPix paintings!!)

Next, she checks again that the mural looks exactly like the museum people want, and then she starts adding colour to the drawing.

Now she adds more and more solid colour, building up the details. You can see that she has done more work on the left side than on the right at this stage.

By the time she has finished this particular mural, it will be about fifteen metres long, so the animals in the painting will be round about life sized! She painted five big murals like this for a museum in Oklahomoa, USA, and it took about 1500 hours of painting. That's a lot of time! If you came to school every day, and painted all the time you were at school, it would take you a year and a half to finish! (I think Karen Carr probably worked for more than five hours a day to get this job finished!)

Finally Karen sends the finished mural to the museum. It is such an enormous computer file that it won't even fit on a CD Rom! They print it out in pieces on large squares of vinyl, and these are put up on the wall of the museum like bits of wallpaper. In the photo above you can see the start of this process, with only two bits up there on the wall.