During this past year the agency I work for has been gearing up for their move from the Loop into Chicago's newly renovated Old Post Office in early 2020. It's exciting that we'll be part of the first new tenants to work in this iconic and historic landmark that has been vacant since it's closure in the 90's. I can go on and on about the building, it's a beautiful building, but that's not the point of this post. The agency put up an internal contest for people to submit ideas for street art themed murals that would go up in various places throughout the new office space. I submitted a few ideas and one of them was chosen! For this piece I wanted to blend Art Deco, which was the architectural style of the Old Post Office, with the unique cartoon style of the 1920's, the era in which the building was built.
I met with the agency's head of creative to discuss the concept and some revisions that were needed. I was also asked to redesign the idea to work on two separate but identical walls.
Before tackling the task of making this work as two different pieces I chose to explore colors. Because the style was based on solid areas of color I made each color it's own layer in Photoshop so that I could just add a color overlay and easily switch colors without doing any more painting/filling.
I had started this piece with a certain idea in mind and I found it difficult to change gears when I was asked to split it into two parts and dial back on the Hindu flavor. For the longest time I had no idea what direction to go in and sketched out several iterations in order to exorcise the bad ideas. I went all over from demons to anthropomorphized multi-armed Chicago mascots before I finally nailed down a male human head I liked and realized that I could simply make the two parts a guy and a girl.
I penciled out a final draft of the twins and came up with some different things to have in their hands. I also did another color round since so much had changed. Once it was approved I traced over the whole thing in Illustrator in order to provide scalable art for the printers to use. The head of creative initially wished for these to be hand painted on the walls, but time was limited before the move.
The final pieces.
I'll update this post when I manage to get photos of the art on the walls.
*UPDATE* I finally got around to posting some crappy photos of this stuff on the walls like I said I would do!
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