CITY OF GEARS GIANT MONSTER MURAL!

HEY APATHY OUTDOOR WALL MURALS! The city is a giant gear propelled by all strange inhabitants spiraling through it. In the distance we see the giant windmill like cog wheels infinitely propelled by anonymous little bubble people. As we move towards the streets of the monstrous metropolis, the faceless denizens begin to introduce themselves. Monsters, villains, heroes, and commuters encompass the city walk like some fantastic carnival of strange wonders. From our new vantage it becomes apparent that it is in fact all the individual characters and their unique actions, not endlessly unidentifiable hordes, who make the city spin!!! 

DRAW GRAFFITI:
THE GIANT WALL PROCESS

Painting outdoor wall murals of this size is a huge process. The first thing was priming the wall white, which I did with giant poles and rollers. There was absolutely no budget for this project, a pure labor of love & insanity. I do not recommend trying this technique as it probably took several years off of my life expectancy (see labor of love & insanity comment ). Bricks are extremely unforgiving when it comes to paint and a lot of time was spent trying to fill in small cracks and crevasses. The priming took about 3-4 days too complete.

 The next step was to paint the building outlines which I also did using poles and rollers. This works well for the geometric shapes and lines I illustrate my architecture with. I painted the characters and the details along the using brushes and small rollers. Then I got up on the 40 foot ladder with a brush and worked my way across the top banner and buildings filling in cracks, adding details and creating the sequential banner across the top. I could generally finish a 40 ft x 5 ft strip each night. (I was performing on the streets full time during the days so this was an after work project and done almost entirely by street-lamp-light- it's a wonder I didn't pass out and fall off the ladder.)

It took about 40 nights spread out over a couple of months to finish the whole thing. Since then I have had the luck of working on other murals with bigger budgets and have realized the extended process of this work was primarily due to the lack of energy after working all day on the streets and the lack of proper equipment. Generally I can complete works of this scale in a matter of days with scaffolding (instead of a ladder) and a full time schedule. Nevertheless this was an amazing adventure and experience and I’m really glad I had the chance to create this crazy work of art.