Category Archives for Graphic Design

Have You Been Working Out?

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… ‘Cause you’re looking buff!

(CLASSIC GAG.)

The portable piece to match the Flatiron mural is complete! The background is an abstraction of a section of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, and creeping in from the left there is an American Buffalo/Bison. The ‘canvas’ is birch wood (takes me back to my architecture university days of model making!), so it took a little bit of extra priming. Big ups to Klaus who collaborated with the taping, geometries and colour advisory… And also helped me with the opening gag for this post.

Let it be known that the proceeds of this work is directly funding the software with which I’m writing my next screenplay. Literally, art for art’s sake. It’s like that movie ‘the human centipede’ – except without all the people dying. Maybe it’s more like an arty ecosystem. I think I should buy a felt hat. Or grow out my armpit hair.

Did I mention the house this work is for is in an area called Cow Hollow? Bovine coincidence? I think not.

Wait! I’ve got one more:

Q. What did the buffalo say when his son left for school?

A. Bison.

Gold.

Prime then tape. This project clearly took priority over the screenplay I’m mapping out on those system cards underneath the plastic!
All taped up
Block paint
Sponge for texture
Pull the tape! (Best bit)
Wood lines, paint lines…
Nice little wrap around
Pre-bison
Bison begins
Growing…
Grooooowing…..
Bison! And a golden little rising moon.

Painty Pointy Precipice

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I was commissioned to paint this mural for a house in Cow Hollow. The request was for the image of a Bison as a tribute to Boulder, Colorado (and which I also thought was appropriate considering the mural’s location).

Enlisting Klaus, we set about taping up and painting an abstract version of the Flatirons rock formation for the background. I then-

Nope. No, I then did nothing else.

I intended on drawing a giant Bison on this chunk of dining room wall, but never got the chance. It seems our patron was so pleased with the work, that he wanted us to leave it as-is, and paint him a separate artwork that is in keeping with the theme, but one that he can also take with him when he moves out of the house one day. How good is that? Keep ’em peeled for part 2!

Priming the background
Primed.
Tape
Tape
Taperoo
Cutting tape to make 3d pattern
Slow and steady
Somehow we managed to cut all the right bits, without error!
Gold.
3 kinds of gold!
Sea sponge for texture
The best bit…
Pulling the tape!
Voila!
mural graphics

What Does the Fox Say?

 

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In the interest of staying relevant and on the pulse of popular culture. Wait. Let me start again. In a convenient coincidence, I have just finished a mural of foxes in the same week as the release of that catchy new hit single  “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” (dingadingdingding ding) touted as this year’s Gangnam Style – so you know it’s a ripper.

Finally someone (three former members of the Harvard Fox Club) let me paint a massive double-height wall in their residential home with the help of many pals, two big-ass ladders, a ton of nachos and the occasional beer. After drawing a shockingly vague sketch on an old cardboard box of how I wanted the geometries done, it took about a month (a few nights every week and a party) and here’s the progress:

Pascale taping
Klaus checking out his tape work
Painting party
Kramer and Katie helped us one night… But this is a picture of Kramer and Klaus
Big-ass ladders
After the tape came off… Crisp geometries
Krink pen for the foxes

Yep, little guy on the right is totally dreaming up those shapes.

An overwhelming number of people who came to see the mural commented how strikingly ‘3D’ it appeared in person. About 4 people. Such feedback pleased me as it is, after all, 2 dimensional pretending to be 3 dimensional. Which is not that many dimensions compared to how many we might actually be existing amongst according to string theory. Anyone who has ever wondered about space and time should watch the series The Fabric of the Cosmos: It’s fascinating.

Special thanks to all who helped: Klaus, Paul, Pascale, the 2 Canadian Alex’s, Katie, Kramer and all you cats at the post-masking tape party. And the landlord – for not spewing about it.

If you think this is the last fox post, buddy – you are wrong. All good things come in threes.

Thievery, family and paint.

So I vanished from the interwebs for a couple of weeks – and for good reason, well three good reasons. The foremost being: I had no computer. Why? Well this mural above is largely at fault. So am I, but I would certainly prefer to put the blame on something inanimate who will wear it with far more grace than me. Yes – I was painting this mural with Klaus at [freespace] with my car parked out the front (“who parks a car in SOMA?!” – says everyone after the fact.) and my window got smashed, my trunk opened and my laptop and camera gear (among many other things) were flogged.

This is just a symptom of me being a huge noob in San Francisco. Yep, it’s a learning curve. Turns out everyone I mention my tale of woe to has had something stolen from them within the last year in this city. Most of them not lucky enough to have travel insurance and to end up with a faster-than-Usain-Bolt, higher-resolution-than-real-life, brand new macbook pro. Like moi. What a smug little bastard. There it is again. Lemons to lemonade. I do still find myself sans a decent camera, but that will come.

Anyway – the half-finished mural. It’s a collab with Dr Klaus again (although my mum who was in town last week (WHICH WAS EXCELLENT) did have a hand in mixing some colours for us) and there’ll be some ink on top. Perhaps the dripping whitewash will give you a clue…

… Okay the suspense is killing me. I’m thinking of drawing a cow on it.

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We also did these posters that will be cut in half, branded and gifted as thank you’s for the good people who donated to the second month of [freespace]. We taped up some poster paper and when choosing colours, I suggested “let’s just do the whole thing gold”. No objections from Klaus.

In retrospect, the Dr Klaus/thedarclaud mural style may have been ominous – looking like smashed glass and all, one might say we predicted the theft from my car, Carlos. Which would make us clairvoyant. So my next post may be just purely tea leaf-based art.

Mural Mural on the Wall

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Aaaaaaaand it’s done. Chicken mural – check… en mural.

The Pensive Poultry Collection’s Zen Hen? Glorified. Dr Klaus and thedarclaud? Creatively immortalised until they rent the building out to someone else and repaint the whole place white. Good thing I took some photos.

Massive thanks to [freespace] for giving us a wall to get clucky all over. Last night was the exhibition and fundraising party – the most bohemian of hoots. Full of LED lights, bubble machines, face paints – wow. It’s sounding more like a rave. It really was very bohemian. There was an organic veggie patch and a ‘parkcycle‘.

By the looks of the freespace july indiegogo campaign today, we’re going to have another month of it…. which translates to another mural! STRAP IN, BARNYARD FANS. Probably looking at some bovine related content next time around, so all you beef enthusiasts – brace yourselves.

Pre-party and jazzed:

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Good heavens! My hand has disappeared.

Expanding the Canvas – Work in Progress

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Turning lemons into lemonade. Isn’t that just something. I think that I can attribute a good proportion of the successes in my life to exactly this.

The proverbial ‘closing a door and opening a window’.

And this time, it lead me to this mural I’m working on with Klaus.

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It was a miserable drizzling day yesterday in San Francisco but we were still endeavouring to get to some free dance classes in Golden Gate Park. After a cascade of events that mounted against the dance class plan, we found ourselves heading to a ‘postcard festival’ in SOMA as advertised on fun & cheap. Turns out there is only one post card in the whole place, but it’s crammed full of artists and they’ve got a wall that they’re wanting us to work on for the [FreeSpace] exhibition on June 26th. HELLO LEMONADE.

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So we rode our bikes through the rain today with a backpack full of paint (leftover from prop building for Winning Formula), masking tape and tupperware and laid siege on this wall with only a vague plan in place. And who dropped past while we were working? This suited-and-tied chap with some deep Patrick Bateman vibes. How’s Christian Bale playing Bateman and Batman? Only difference is the ‘e’. Well there are lots of character differences but that’s not where I was going with it. Anyway, the guy who came to visit was the Lieutenant Governor of California and former Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom (here’s an image comparison just to make this all worthwhile: Newsom vs. Bateman). Nice guy though.

We’re halfway done on this mural and I’m heading back tomorrow for round two. Ding ding.

Well how about writing something?

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The last three years of my writing work just culminated a little over a month ago in shooting Winning Formula, my feature film with LFL Entertainment. There was such a wild flurry of writing for so long that when we went into production, the physical doing of filmmaking was such a welcome change.

Last night I hit the cinema to watch This Is The End which was so massively entertaining (although it did beat me to the punch on a Backstreet Boys reference and cameo which gave me the irits a bit) and it was a real call to action to get back to writing, something I’ve been contemplating over the past few weeks but pushing aside to draw chickens.

I feel like drawing for me is so instantly satisfying. You think of an idea, draw, and then you have a picture. And it’s done. Not like filmmaking. That takes a long ass time. You think of an idea, you refine it, you plan it out, you write it, you revise it, you – anyway trust me there’s a ton of steps before you have a picture. As you can imagine, the product and the emotional payoff from working on a project that’s at the scale of a film is proportional. And by that I mean huge.

So I’ve got 3 different film concepts in mind. All very different, but all comedy… I think. And there’s one concept that has the potential to be the complete celebrity orgy that This Is The End was… if I get lucky. And as Get Lucky is apparently the song of the summer, I reckon I’m in with a chance. I dig good omens, no matter how much they are not specifically directed at me. So keep ’em peeled! In the meantime, Winning Formula is in post production so there’ll be a ton of content pouring through the facebook page as we move towards release. Frothing.

Guys. Relax. There’ll be more poultry. Probably even as soon as tomorrow. You might just get clucky.

A feature film? Yeah, I did one.

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A feature film? Yeah, I did one. It’s called ‘Winning Formula’, it’s a comedy, I wrote it, my mother doesn’t like the script but you win some and you lose some, I like the script, and we wrapped production on it last month in Los Angeles under LFL Entertainment. I will probably become very wealthy and well known in exclusive circles as a result of this film. Specifically, wealthy in knowledge and the exclusive circle being the cast and crew – but I’m open to expansion if you’re interested.

Anyway, here’s the synopsis:

While backpacking around America, two Aussie girls find themselves deep in turtle racing debt to a notorious gangster. Constantly validating each other’s bad decisions, they devise crafty plans to keep their heads above water, earning money any way they can while unwittingly become tangled in a dark mystery surrounding their family’s past. Through the hardest of times, they learn to embrace what is right on their caravan doorstep: romance, friends and family – with a side order of juice.

Yep. Sounds like a hoot, hey.

Well you can expect more updates on this little gem as the year (and post-production) progresses. This space shall clog up like the proverbial crapper with trailers, posters and links to high-profile premiers. ‘High-profile’ is of course an exaggeration but there will certainly be opportunities to catch a screening here and there.

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