Here at Fresh Creative Co, painting walls is more than just a job, it’s also a hobby and a passion, so whenever we get the chance between jobs we like to get out and paint a little something just for fun.
A few weeks back we teamed up with friend and fellow artist The Hass to paint this King Kong themed graffiti style mural on Swansea’s seafront legal graffiti wall.
PROCESS
Just as we do with our usual mural work, this one started out in our lab with some brainstorming to decide on a theme for the piece. We wanted the wall to have a large feature character and the decision to use the King Kong style gorilla snatching the flaming helicopter out of the air helped to inform the feel of the rest of the background. We went for a city scape flanking both ends of the wall with an elevated train line running through it into the foreground. Along the base of the wall we added some flaming debris flying out from the cities destruction.
Once we had these main elements in place we roughed our some preliminary sketches on paper before mocking up a design for the wall using photoshop. Armed with this plan, we hit the Fresh Murals Co workshop to sort out paint for the project.
Once on site we used spray paint to mark up the main elements of the wall. We then fleshed our the bulk of the background, filling in the sky and getting some darker colours in along the bottom of the wall. We then focussed on painting the gorilla in the centre of the wall, making sure to get the proportions correct. Next we worked on the letters. As always with graffiti styles, we tried to get a good flow in the letters, choosing this time to paint a ‘wildstyle’ letter piece. Wildstyle is a traditional type of graffiti dating back to the 1980’s in which the artist adds extra connectors, arrows and other elements into the piece to disguise the letters, whilst at the same time attempting to keep a solid cohesive structure to the letters themselves.
At this point we took photos of the wall and went back to the lab and took the wall back into photoshop. Here we overlaid a transparency of the original design over the photos of the wall and used this to check any parts of the design where our mark up may not match the original as well as it could. We found that the train we’d marked up had a little room for improvement so we made a new mark up for corrections that we wanted to make over the photos of the wall. We took this new plan and headed back the next day to make the alterations to the various parts of the markup that we thought needed some extra work before painting in the train and adding the details to the buildings in the background. Next we added in the fire and the debris along the base of the wall and also added in the final parts of the sky, including the birds and the extra helicopters circling above. Lastly we added some miniature graffiti pieces both on the trains and also on the rooftops of the background buildings
FINISHED PIECE
This was a really enjoyable wall to paint and we were really happy with how it turned out. Thanks also to The Hass for both the help with painting the wall and also for the great little video of it he made.
