Thursday, November 19, 2009

The evolution of a building mural




My apartment has a good view of downtown, and in the middle of the view is this building that has a huge advertising mural covering the entire side.  The building is on Wilshire Ave., and is actually a bit west of downtown.  The "before" photo above is the best one I have, if I'd realized they were about to repaint it I'd have taken a better one.

Around Halloween, they started painting over the old mural one-quarter of the building at a time, and after about four days the side of the building was completely white.  It then occurred to me to document the painting of the new mural with my rarely-used zoom lens:


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It's an ad for the new videogame, Grand Theft Auto 5.  There's at least one other mural like this downtown, although on a smaller building.  It took about 2 weeks to paint this one.

4 comments:

  1. Hey Nancy-
    Thanks, yes, I did enjoy this (did you photograph this? Great time lapse sequence!), and yes, that's the way we used to do it- very painstaking process, which is why it is mostly obsolete- they mostly inkjet then hang a banner or shrink-wrap entire buildings now. Only in California do they appreciate the original process- like skywriting, the "making of" process turns a lot of heads.

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