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!

My A'th Kar NQY - Second Mural Update.

I went to check out the site for the new My A'th Kar NQY mural on Wednesday, and as you can see from the photo above it's a pretty drab affair! The hoardings that have been erected are to cover up the old derelict bus station, and go all the way around ffom the public toilets to the derelict hotel at the back. There are 87 panels in total, and we're on a mission to paint them all in a week this half term!

Here's a few rough designs of what we're intending to paint on the hoardings. I've tried to keep it as simple and effective as possible, in order for the production of the panels to go as smoothly and as quickly as possible, while working with groups of young people who will be helping us with the process.

Hopefully we can still keep the message that the young people want to convey with this project, just by using the large text to spell out one of the phrases used in the first mural. I'm going to be using the silhouetted figures from the first mural, and the Police Station design too, keeping a theme running throughout the whole project.

I might use the figures as spaces between the words to break up the text, or just randomly insert them within the letters, not sure yet. Got a bit more drawing and designing to do before we actually start painting. Gotta get it right! What ever will appear on these hoardings, it's going to a whole lot brighter than what's already there!

Work In Progress - Lanyon Quoit.

Another work in progress, this time going inland up to Lanyon Quoit, the famous Cornish Quoit on the road from Madron to Morvah. Above is the first sketch on A3 paper, and the following photos are the process of reproducing it onto canvas with Spray Paint, acrylic paint and Posca Pen.

Again, still some more work to be done, i'll keep you posted on it's progress!

My A'th Kar NQY - Second Mural

The My A'th Kar NQY Public Art Project will be entering into it's next phase in the next few weeks, with work on a second mural about to take place in Newquay town centre. We've just scored a major coup in our campaign to blast away all Newquay eyesores. We've managed to secure one of the towns most hated sites, the dirty and dragged down old bus station!

This site is in the process of having hoardings put up all around it, to try and cover up this derelict space. Our job is to now decorate these hoardings with a mural that follows on from the first mural. I've already started working on some preliminary sketches for the design which will incorporate text into it, like the previous mural.

There are a total of 87 panels to transform into a message from the young people of Newquay, about how they feel about the place that they live, and about how they would like visitors and tourists to treat the town. It's going to be a massive team effort from myself and the group of youngsters i've been working with, and also members of the general public who will be donating their time for free to help transform a depressingly derelict area of Newquay!

The idea is to try and create a bright and fun piece of public art, that will carry a message to the general public. At the moment we're looking for a large school or church hall to paint the panels in, which will be then transported to the sight and installed. If there's anyone out there that can help us with such a large space, then get in touch please!

At least on this mural, i won't be having to climb up and down scaffolding, or be outside painting in the snow! It's always nice to be able to creative inside in the warm!