Lettering enamel on drywall
Tucson Mall was always expanding, and the contractor would throw up some drywall, tape it mud it prime it coat it and then it was my turn. My tight scale drawing was all that was needed, then I drew everything directly on the wall and painted it with quills. They let me borrow the mall scissors-lift to get altitude, which saved lots of time.
There is a strong element of performance art when one is the mall muralist. Mall management would set up theater-style ropes and stanchions to keep the peoples away from the wet paint and the working painter. My Walkman was another neccessary tool when working away from home, as some of the peoples would accuse me of “cheating” when they realized I was drawing the work first.
In this image, note the window cut into the drywall to satisfy the curious. As for the design, well, it was the eighties.
Here is the second-floor mural for the new food court. More of the same, slightly different.
On a side note, I took these pics with a disposable panoramic camera, a version that was only available for a few years.
Still in the eighties here, OMG! But drawn directly on the wall from a tight scale drawing, the final painted work about 5’ by 5’.
This was drawn and painted on a large curved wall during another expansion.
The mall management would hand me the blurriest faxed-image logos you can imagine, usually at business card size, and then it was up to me to figure it out. The average copy height here is about 5”.
Such is the transitory nature of signage; how many of these entities survived?
I am particularly fond of the Nature Company bunny, as the provided imagery was a blurry fuzzy faxed image about half an inch tall. All the logos were drawn in pencil directly on the wall and then painted with quills. The logos here are painted at 2’ by 4’ or thereabouts.
