This was an exciting project! To celebrate 2019’s Lunar New Year, The Strand shopping centre in Melbourne’s CBD collaborated with Just Another Agency and me to put on a live painting event – 7 days painting 4 big canvases in centre with the theme ‘Year of the Pig’.
Each canvas was 1.5m tall x 1m wide, MASSIVE for me, and the brief was pigs, dragons, and something ‘Melbourne’ so I took some photos of some of the landmarks in Melbourne’s Chinatown and converted these into pattern stencils to use over the animal’s bodies.
I had a 7 day window to finish these in the centre, so I did a bit of prep work at home….a few layers of background wash using Golden’s Fluid Acrylic Ochre:
The Walrus helped me out getting the transfers ready:
I transferred the design and did some basic underpainting and colour washes:
Then on Jan 29th everything was loaded into Toby’s ute and set up in the centre. I painted each day from Jan 29th – Feb 5th in a little roped off area. A few pics of my workstation I took over the next 7 days:
Thanks Walrus for the drum stool! Very useful and swivelly.
The obligatory messy tools pic….big thanks to St Luke Art in Collingwood for helping me pick the right materials and the pigment advice.
A photographer came down to take a few snaps of me painting:
And here are the 4 finished panels:
After the pieces were finished they stayed up in the centre for another month, and using an augmented reality app people could view the works with animated layers of colour, patterns and photos of chinatown that I created using the Eyejack augmented reality app.
These panels were auctioned afterwards to support the Sisterworks charity.
Big thanks to The Strand for having me, my Agency for the support and to all the lovely people who came down for a chat and who said nice things x
