A whale of a mural designed by an Edmonton company for the Vancouver Winter Olympics will be officially unveiled Thursday in Edmonton, and none of the artists who worked on it knew what the final product would be.

During creation, "we like to keep the main image a secret, and we don't tell anybody," said Lewis Lavoie, founder of Mural Mosaic, the company behind the work of art.

More than 200 paintings were painted in studios across Canada, then assembled into a huge mural. (CBC) Each of the 231 panels in the work was painted by a Canadian artist who received only the tile and a colour scheme. What was painted on each 30-centimetre-square panel was up to them.

The tiles were then assembled into a single image that measures 3.4 metres high by 6.4 metres wide.

"The whole mural comes to life without them knowing what it's going to be," said Phil Alain, one of the project's producers.

The completed painting, an Orca with a baby whale, is synonymous with the West Coast, said Lavoie, adding the mural itself is a metaphor for life. Many of the artists are from the West Coast, but others were selected from across Canada, he said.

The goal was to give Olympic visitors a taste of art from across the country, in the form of an image that represents the Pacific Coast.

Lewis Lavoie says the larger message of the mural is 'unity through diversity.' (CBC)

"When you're up close you see all the individual squares, but when you step back, there's what I call the sweet spot. When you step on that sweet spot, you see the big grand picture," said Lavoie.

"And I think that's a reflection of life ... most of us can't get far enough back from our circumstances to see the big picture."

The mural will be unveiled at the TransAlta Arts Barns in Edmonton's Old Strathcona district Thursday night.

Its permanent home will be on B.C.'s Galiano Island, where it will be assembled in February in time for the Olympics.