Night Club Mural / Dynamite Hip Hop.

I was asked a few weeks ago by my friends Paul and Charlie at Sound Night Club in Penzance, if i would like to have a go at doing some kind of painting in Room 2 of the club. This room is normally used for Dynamite Hip Hop nights, and they wanted a kind of urban feel going on. Initially they wanted something on the front of the bar, and on the front of the new DJ booth that was going to be installed.

My first idea was to do a design that involved a skyline silhoutte of Penzance that went around the front of the bar, and also went around the front of DJ booth (under construction in the photo above!) aswell. The guys wanted to keep the colours of the design in keeping with the colours of the club, ie black, grey and white. The also kind of wanted the design to go from the DJ booth and onto the wall too, so i started to have a go at some ideas which you can see below.

The skyline was now going to go on the wall next to the booth, and carry onto it too! I needed something else, so i decided to use the telegraph poles i used to use in old paintings, and the clouds that i've been doing in recent ones! I then decided i needed to come up with something that was in keeping with the musical connections to the venue, so i had a crack at a stack of old vintage speakers. So now i had the elements for the mural, all i needed to do was make them fit into the space and make it look good! Here's some photos below to show the evolution of the mural.

The design kind of took on a life of it's own, as i took it behind the booth aswell to make it look like the DJ is surrounded by speakers in an urban setting, even though the buildings are based on Penzance! A final touch for the finished mural was to use UV paint in an old school way, to put highlights on the speakers and the windows in the buildings as you can see from the photo below!

Now it just needs me to get some photos of the space in action at the next Dynamite Hip Hop night, which will feature UK Hip Hop artist Jehst! For more details of the gig follow this link http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=120952084646971. Look out for more Dynamite Hip Hop events coming up over the coming months here http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=226031831204&v=wall, including Mystro, Dr. Syntax, Genesis Elijah, and Del The Funky Homosapien, and another possibly major US Hip Hop artist! There'll also be some more artwork from myself to help promote the best Hip Hop promoters in the South West! Big shout outs to Tom Sweetman from 1Step Productions (http://www.1stepproductions.com/) who's responsible for getting some of these guys out on tour!

New Paintings.

I've just recently hung a load of paintings in the Bakehouse Restaurant in Penzance. There's a mixture of old and new paintings including the first painting that i did in Cornwall 10 years ago, which you can see below!

The rest of the paintings are made up of ones that i have done since then, and a couple of new ones. It's nice to see the progression of my paintings over such a long period, and to see how much things have changed. Here's some images of the new paintings which i have featured before in previous blogs as 'work in progress'!

A big thank you to Rachael and Andy from the Bakehouse for letting me inflict my brightly coloured creations on their fine diners! http://www.bakehouserestaurant.co.uk/

My A'th Kar NQY, Police Station Mural.

Last week i completed the final mural for the My A'th Kar NQY public art project. This finished mural will soon be installed on the central tower of Newquay Police Station. Myself and Kasha, one of the guys from the MAKN group painted this mural on 8, 8' x 4' panels. We carried out the painting on the roof of Burger King in Newquay in the beautiful sunshine of Easter week! Here's a few photos that kind of show the progress of how the painting went from bare panels on Monday to the finished panels stored on the top floor of Burger King on Saturday!

Akil The MC - Artwork And Tour Poster.

Dynamite Hip Hop have been putting on some quality Hip Hop nights down here in Penzance, and i've done a few posters for them now! The latest one being for Akil the MC, who was back in town after a stomping gig last year. This time around i did a poster for the gig down here, and also a UK Tour poster too. The artwork for this has also been used on merch for Akil being sold on his tour!

For the Penzance gig, Akil was going to be supported by 4 resident Dynamite DJ's, who are all local guys that i know well. So i decided to do a poster which would involve the 4 local DJ's standing behind Akil. Here's a few images that show the progression from sketch to finished portrait of each DJ that would eventually be used on the poster.

Each one of the portraits were hand drawn, then touched up in Photoshop. It was quite a challenge to draw 4 people that you know, and try and make them look like them too!

So, on the poster then, you get Louis Vanhinsberg, Ali Walker, Paul Robbins and Paul Weschke done over in a McIvor style! The guys were quite pleased with the results, although Mr. Weschke did say he would have preferred me to make him look a bit more street, and a little less camp!

Sorry Paul, it's only slightly camp, but it still fitted in well with the other guys once they were all grouped together to flank the great Jurassic 5 MC. I hand drew logo for his name too, and then mashed everything together to make the final poster below.

Tom Sweetman from 1 Step Productions, the company who is handling Akil's UK Tour, then asked me to do a different version of the poster with just Akil on it, to use as the tour poster which could also be sold at shows across the UK. For this, i took out the local DJ's from the Penzance poster, and then changed the colouring of the poster, to still make it look like both posters were still relevant to each other.

It was also Toms birthday the day of the Penzance gig, so me and Charlie Quinn (Dynamite Hip Hop Head Honcho) decided to treat him to a present consisting of prints of posters for gigs he'd organised in Penzance as a memory of his adventures with 1 Step Productions! These included gigs by Akil and Souls Of Mischief. Nice little pressie for him to put on the walls of his office i reckon! There'll be more Dynamite / 1 Step posters from me coming soon!

My A'th Kar NQY Update.

So, since we last spoke, the My A'th Kar NQY mural project has taken a few twists and turns! As you can see from the photo of me above, the Burger King mural got a lovely new paint job but after some great campaigning by the local community and the media, BK has kindly offered the project £3000 to recreate the mural somewhere else in Newquay. So we're now on the look out for a suitable site to reproduce our mural again!

While we're looking for a new site for the BK mural, we've been hard at work on the mural for the old Newquay Bus Station site. We spent a week last half term painting 70 panels for the site, with the help of some very willing and able local volunteers.

We had a mammoth task on our hands, paint 70 panels in 5 days with gloss paint! My very good friend, Natalie Smith, took time out from here studying in London to lend an invaluable helping hand, and Sarah Pym from RIO (Real Ideas Organisation) cleared her schedule for the week to get stuck in with us on the creative battlefront!

Over the course of the 5 days, we had between 40 - 50 volunteers come along to participate in creating a very public piece of artwork to share with the community. Everybody who came along were very focused on the task at hand, but still managed to have a bit of fun and enjoy themselves in a very relaxed and friendly creative working environment!

I can safely say that this project was one of the most intense, but ultimately the most fun and rewarding project that i've worked on for a while! There was a lot of pressure to organise and finish the job on such a tight schedule, but everybody involved pulled together and worked tirelessly to get the job done!

Gloss paint is bugger to paint with, especially on such a scale as this, and working with younger people who are prone to getting paint all over themselves! We had to put a lot of measures in place to make sure that the kids weren't going home to their parents covered in gloss paint!

As the week progressed, the paint pile just kept on growing and growing! Mixing all the colours for the panels was great fun. We went through a few tins of red, blue, yellow and white paint in order to achieve the desired effect!

Logistically this was a nightmare too, as we had to keep moving panels in and out of the school hall we were using in order to make sure each one had been drawn on and had 2 coats applied to it! But with a bit of jiggery pokery, we managed this rather large balancing act with minimum hassle!

The project also proved to be a great way to pass on handy tips on painting techniques to some very budding young artists! Lets just hope we inspired a few of the next generation to follow in our creative footsteps.

A massive thank you to everyone who came along and did such a wonderful job of painting, and for donating their valuable time to this project. Thanks also to Natalie Smith, Sarah Pym, Rhona Gardener & Excess Energy, and David Chadwick. I'd like to extend a big thank you to David Jones and i-Site, the company who provided us with the panels, and who installed them at the bus station site for us.

The panels are now all up and in position, so get yourselves down to Newquay to have a little look. Eventually there will be a little trial to follow around Newquay to the various murals with have been, and will be completed. More details of this will be released shortly, so keep your eyes peeled!