After a sluggish start in the World Series, the Houston Astros traveled to the nation’s capital and painted the town orange. And moments after each of three victories in Washington against the Nationals, the Astros set a local artist to work back home to paint H-town.

Reid Ryan, president of business operations for the Astros, explained the team’s postseason graffiti project on social media. “Each time the #Astros win a postseason game, a local graffiti artist will paint a mural for that game,” he tweeted. “Hopefully we end up with 11 of these around H-Town.”

Dubbed “Paint H-Town,” the mural series now stands at 10, after Gonzo247’s latest creation in Pearland Town Center. At the end of the regular season, the Astros needed 11 wins to clinch the World Series. Win No. 11 could come Tuesday night.

The murals have become a scavenger hunt with fans and families traversing the city seeking them out for a photo to post to Twitter and Instagram along with the hashtag, #PaintHTown. The hunt has admittedly grown increasingly difficult to complete as locations of the paintings have gradually sprawled outward from the city’s center.

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Gonzo, a huge Astros fan who grew up in the East End, knew after the seventh inning he had to get ready to paint. He started at 3 a.m. and put the finishing touches on late Monday afternoon. For his mural, he turns the “Take it Back” slogan into a constellation in a dark sky and tells the story of World Series Game 5 in the tail of a flaming baseball with the numbers 44 (for Yordan Alvarez, who hit a huge, 2-run homer) and 45 (winning pitcher Gerrit Cole).

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Jennifer Muñoz and her son Ethan, 16, saw the mural on social media and headed to Pearland Town Square, catching Gonzo for a photo as he packed up his El Camino Monday evening. “We don’t ever have anything this cool,” she said.

“It’s been amazing to see the response,” Gonzo said. “Art is such a great vehicle for community engagement. It really gives a sense that we’re all in this together, and that’s really the power of art.”

The first mural appeared Oct. 5 on a wall at Warehouse Live, east of downtown and five blocks from Minute Maid Park. It was a piece of ’80s-influenced street art, with an almost glowing “TAKE IT BACK” painted over a melting mix of rainbow colors and a black canvas of words: “HOUSTON,” “H-TOWN,” “ASTROS.”

Even Houstonians unfamiliar with Sebastien “Mr. D” Boileau’s name may know his work. Boileau is a French artist who has been painting more than 30 years. He’s called Houston home for nearly two decades. His “Preservons la Creation” (“Let’s preserve creation”) is impossible to miss at the intersection of Fannin and Tuam. Boileau created an 8,000-square-foot mural of God with a couple of spray paint cans, a tip of the hat to Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.”

Astros post-season murals Win #1: Warehouse Live, 813 St. Emanuel Win #2: Lola in the Heights, 1102 Yale Win #3: Brewingz, Northtown Plaza, 5402 North Freeway Win #4: Velvet Taco, 907 Westheimer Win #5: First Colony Mall, The Lawn, 16535 Southwest Freeway, Sugar Land Win #6: Torchy’s Tacos, 2156 Spring Steubner, Spring Win #7: Baybrook Mall, Friendswood Win #8: Towne Lake Boardwalk near World of Beer, 9945 Barker Cypress Road, Cypress Win #9: LaCenterra, 23501 Cinco Ranch, Katy Win #10: Pearland Town Center, 11200 Broadway, Pearland

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The second mural appeared in the Heights. The third on the Northside. After the Astros dispatched the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Divisional Series and the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series, the murals began to move farther afield from Minute Maid Park.

Gabriel Prusmack’s mural after the Astros won the American League pennant required a visit to Baybrook Mall. The mural for the Astros’ first 2019 World Series win Friday night was painted in Towne Lake. Saturday night’s game was memorialized in paint with a representation of Alex Bregman’s grand slam; it can be found on a garage at LaCenterra in Katy’s Cinco Ranch.

“I love the raw emotion that the artists have been capturing,” rapper and Astros devotee Paul Wall said. He brought up Bregman’s walkoff hit from the 2017 World Series. “These paintings exude the same feelings I felt watching that.”

The turnaround for the artists is sharp.

Jon Garner painted George Springer, Zach Greinke and Carlos Correa — showing the backs of their jerseys, with the players facing a crowd. He says the mural got the OK from the Astros about two-and-a-half hours after the Astros defeated the Yankees 8-3 in Game 4 of the ALCS.

“I packed up, ran out there and started painting,” he said of his wall at the Market at Springwoods Village in Spring. “I painted until the sun came up. I went back to my studio, took a two-hour nap to rejuvenate myself, and then headed back out to paint another two hours.”

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He posted a photo of himself in front of the mural looking a little bleary, his Astros hat and “Take it back” shirt smudged with black paint.

Garner and Boileau offer two of many different Houstonian archetypes. Garner is a Houston native with deep roots in the city, which fed his interest in salvaging hardwood floorboards from demolished historic homes. He paints and sells street-art style paintings of cultural figures on those floorboards. His mural experience “is sort of like a reality show, but in a good way,” he said.

“There’s some of my look and feel in there, but they also have an idea of what they want.”

The first mural set a standard for motifs to appear in each painting: A box with the score from the previous night’s game and Xs to represent the number of postseason wins to that point. Garner’s painting had six.

The Game 5 mural brought the X total to 10. A win Tuesday night would provide the 11th and final X.

The Astros have thus far been diligent in keeping artists and locations mum until a full reveal is ready, at which point a new mural finds its way to Twitter.

“It’s a really great opportunity that I just don’t think could have happened in 2005,” Garner said.

“The city and the arts scene have grown so much since then. And there’s a reaching out to the art community that wouldn’t have happened then. Now there’s a pool of 10 or 11 artists they can go to do these murals that …” Garner interrupted himself to laugh, “represent this billion-dollar brand. I’ve never dealt with anything like it before. But it’s a really cool experience to do in this city right now.”

andrew.dansby@chron.com

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