- May 30, 2025
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After drawing a mural April 10 at McNeal Elementary in Lakewood Ranch, Alex Benson received a series of high fives from first graders while leaving the building.
They were congratulating him for his ability to beautify the school.
“They’re all cheering me on, saying ‘He’s a professional. Look at him, he’s an artist, a real artist,’” Benson said. “The kids, especially the younger ones, get a kick out of it.”
He remembered back to when he was one of those young students. He remembered being inspired to become an artist through comic books and video games.
“Looking at all the artwork, it opens the imagination,” Benson said. “I just loved all the possibilities of it.”
Benson, who graduated from Indiana University with a degree in graphic design, has lived in Lakewood Ranch for 10 years. He has worked on three murals at McNeal Elementary to date, beginning with his first in the summer of 2022. Before beginning the process, he had no prior experience in painting murals. His work is all on a volunteer basis.
School Advisory Council Member Havasi saw Benson's elaborate Christmas cookie decorations and recommended that Benson do murals when school officials began talking about beautification projects.
Benson said he knew the basic concept of painting a mural and knew how to create images to scale. He decided to look for a crash course on mural painting before beginning. He used YouTube as his main source of information.
“There’s countless amazing mural artists on there that give so much knowledge away for free,” Benson said.
The first mural he did was about trust with the slogan “Wildcats build trust.” The original idea from the school was to have a paw print of some kind, but Benson came up with the wood sign, spelling out "Trust."
“I did that original trust concept for them and took it in and showed them, and it was way more than what they were expecting,” Benson said.
The mural took five weeks to complete in the month leading up to the 2022-2023 school year.
“In the past I’ve always done more lifelike realism paintings,” Benson said. “With the school I’ve done a lot more cartoony style that is more vibrant and more rich in color.”
The next summer he added onto the original mural in order to include a lighthouse when McNeal became a Leader In Me Lighthouse School. This part of the mural had the slogan “Wildcats shine bright.”
"He has poured so much work into our school to make it better and does anything to support us," said school Principal Sheila Waid. "He asks for nothing in return, and he's a parent who completely supports everything we do here."
To scale up an image, artists typically use a grid format that begins by putting one inch squares all over the painting and scaling it up from one inch to one foot for example. Benson said that would take far too long to do with murals, so he uses the scribble grid method.
“You just scribble random nonsense all over the wall and take a picture of it,” Benson said. “In Photoshop or whatever program you’re using, you put a transparent layer of your illustration on top of the wall and scale it to fit.”
Benson said it is a much faster and precise way to figure out where each part of the mural needs to be.
“Depending on how many doodles you put in there, you can get detailed information of where to start your line and where the next line begins,” Benson said.
When Waid first saw all of the scribbles on the wall, she said she was confused and making fun of what he was painting.
"I was like, somebody go tell him that's not what he drew for me," Waid said. "It was so funny."
The first two murals he did were outdoors, and the mural he is working on currently is indoors. Due to it being indoors, he decided to utilize a projector instead of doing a doodle grid.
To start the process of the mural inside, Benson lightly sketches out the design with pencil before going in with paint.
Waid said that kids in the hallways mistakenly mistook those marks for graffiti one day and started to erase it.
"Oh no, we don't erase that," Waid told the children. "It's supposed to be there."
Benson began painting his newest mural after Christmas break, and plans to complete it over the summer so it is ready for when students return.
The mural will be very detailed with various parts to make up one big picture. First, there is a pirate ship with a captain on it with “GWM” on the side, representing Gilbert W. McNeal.
The ship is meant to travel using a treasure map. Several islands will be painted to represent the "seven habits of happy kids" that students learn at the Leader In Me School.
“Each island will be a fully rendered, detailed thing that you can visit. Then there’s going to be little dotted lines like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons when they show them going across the world,” Benson said. “It will be little hash lines going around from island to island that you’re stopping at along the way.”
Currently, the only parts of the mural in progress are the pirate ship and the first island.
The main challenge Benson has faced creating the murals has been knowing which paints will show up and stick to certain walls. He uses acrylic paint, but wants to experiment and test out better quality point in the future.
“It’s just coat after coat sometimes to get that vibrant rich color to shine through, but I've learned a couple tricks to make it work,” Benson said.
For the current mural, Benson said the biggest challenge will be using ladders to reach high on the wall.
Benson said his family has been supportive of his work.
“It’s a lot of time for me, so they're sacrificing,” Benson said.
Benson's daughter Addison is a fourth grader at the school. She has helped to paint some of the solid colors and she is the only other person to have put a brush on the wall.
“She always asks if she can come along with me to the school,” Benson said. “She gets a kick out of being there when the school is closed.”
Benson said he would love if his daughter wanted to pursue art in the future, but has never been one to push his dreams onto others.
"I just want her to discover her own talents and figure out what she wants to do,’ Benson said. “I would like it if she succeeded where I failed as an artist.”
Benson said he aspired to become a concept artist, something he never realized. If these mural begin to draw interest, he would like to contract out to do more.
He said he would love painting video game characters in a game room.
Benson said it would probably start with a project here and there until he got enough projects under his belt to make it a full time gig.
"I could see him doing this fanywhere, because he is just so creative," Waid said.
