Happy Friday!
Here’s a quick and fun process video of my HOPE mural.
The video was deliberately made gritty, dirty and scratchy, kinda like the state we’re in but we remain hopeful. Hope is what we need to keep our vision straight and bright. Have a great long weekend everyone! Music made by the talented Paul Chin from Toronto.
Turn up the volume!
Thank you:
Vancouver Mural Fest
Vancity Bank
Robson Street
City Of Vancouver
Goodbye Graffiti
The mural took 3 days in total. 1st day was mostly prep work. This included picking up paint and art supplies, priming the wall and sketch work (using a grid system and a good old fashioned chalk).
The 2nd day started early at 9am until 6pm. The bulk of the work was done on the 2nd day and on the 3rd day I spent half of the day finishing up details, fixing mistakes, and photographing the final wall.
Because of the COVID situation, I decided to solo the job to minimize any human interaction. The wall was done almost exclusively with spray paint (from Layout art supplies) for speed. I didn’t have access to water and didn’t know how I was going to treat greywater so it only made sense to spray bomb the whole wall.
The fact that I was soloing the job meant I didn’t have anyone to look after my gear if I had to go to the bathroom, so I decided to not drink anything for the entire time I painted. I was in eco-mode for the entire time which I was quite surprised how well my body adapted. Happy that I didn’t have to resort to adult diapers. ;)
“Everything that is done in the world is done by HOPE.”
—Martin Luther King
✨A Dash of Hope✨ is all we need. I’m super pumped about this new mural I did for the Vancouver Mural Festival and Vancity on 1168 Robson Street. Big thanks to Drew Young and the whole Vancouver Mural Festival team for inviting me to be among the 40+ artists to help brighten up the city with our art. It’s a sad sight to see what used to be a vibrant city to be now all boarded up in our battle against this pandemic.
We all just need a dash of HOPE while keeping away from each other and to stay home as much as we can to help continue to flatten this curve. We can do this.
Big shout out to City of Vancouver for the paint and supplies and Goodbye Graffiti for providing a protective coating to our (hopefully) temporary art. Also a big shout out to our amazing studio manager Aiken Lao for holding everything down remotely while I go paint. My apologies for all my late email, text, IG message responses.
Thank you to all the people that came to say hi from a safe distance, all the strangers that came up to give me props and thumbs up.
And finally to the random crow that stalked me for all three days, thanks for stealing my bag of skinny nibs. You can suck it crow bird.
Last Friday, GDC BC hosted an event called ‘Practivism X‘ that was designed to inspire attendees about the power of design and how it can spark societal change. The event was held at The Reliance Theatre in Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
For the event, we teamed up with Scott Gray from Mitchell Press to come up with a fun interactive mural. Attendees were invited to peel stickers off of the heads of two characters covered in our custom illustrations to reveal the word ‘PRACTICE’ on one mural, and the word ‘ACTIVISM’ on the second mural. Within minutes both murals were completely stripped naked to reveal the words inside the character’s heads and shared on social media.
We’re excited to attend tonight’s VIP launch party at the brand new Porsche Pop-up designer store in Richmond, B.C. where they will be unveiling the all-new and all-electric Porsche Taycan. The first-ever public appearance in Vancouver. Catering by Mak N Ming. Mural assisted by the one and only, Aiken Lao, our very own studio manager.
We’re super proud to have been part of this amazing project for Kabam Studios that Perkins + Will brought us on board last year. We were notified by Kimberly Baba, the Senior Interior Designer from Perkins + Will that the project received an Award of Excellence at the Interior Design Institute of BC’s annual awards. Big ups to Frank from North Side Signs for the printing and installation for the entire art installation.
Here are some photos of the space taken by Ema Peter.
This project for GTB Toronto and Montreal was definitely one of our top 5 projects of this year so far. Working closely with the Executive Creative Director, Yasmin Sahni, we created this multi-layered of crazy fun artwork that’s embedded with a ton of easter eggs including subtle nods to great artists like Keith Haring, Alex Colville, Ai Weiwei, Edward Hopper, The Toronto Raptors, and more. This massive illustration can actually be taken apart as each component is its own entity. Here’s one piece extracted for fun. It’s called ‘The Running Building”.
Here’s a closer look at the mural broken up into two parts.
It was extra nice to be able to work with Frank Turner again, the owner of Clockwork Productions in Toronto. I used to work with Frank way back in the early 2000s when I was an art director working in Toronto. Frank and his team always pull through in spades, so when I knew they were handling the production, I was more than thrilled. Project Management at the studio by Aiken Lao.
Check out more snaps of the mural that we pulled from social.
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Our VMF Hope mural made it on the front page of Vancouver magazine.
Pleasantly surprised to find out (Thank you for the message Leah Gregg!) our ‘A dash of Hope‘ mural commissioned by the Vancouver Mural Festival, Vancity and Robson Street made it on the front page of Vancouver magazine.