Our Public Art Project

Thanks to the amazing Miah Michaelsen and BEAD, this year we were excited to be able to paint our own electrical box in Bloomington with the poster art from our event - by the impressive Bloomington artist Vincent Desjardins. This is HIS story:

Day 1: The Bloomington Handmade Market has asked me to paint my winning poster design on one of the city's electrical boxes. I started work today by painting the primer and the top coat. Tomorrow, I will begin transferring the image. I've never painted an outdoor mural before so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Day 2: 
I spent an hour this morning transferring the design to the electrical box. It involved using a blow up of the poster that had graphite rubbed on the back. After taping it in place, I then pain-stakingly traced over the image to transfer the graphite to the surface of the box.

Day 3: I spent three hours this afternoon working on the electrical box mural for the Bloomington Handmade Market. I think I should be able to finish it up tomorrow. Mark stopped by after classes and took a few pictures of me at work.

Day 4: Spent another three hours working on the electrical box public art project. The main poster image is now finished. Working on Walnut Street, just a few feet from the traffic whizzing by has been an interesting experience. The soundtrack to "Life of Pi" on my iPod helped drown out the traffic noise. It was actually very soothing work music. Now,I'm going to take a few days off before doing anything to the backside of the electrical box. It's not going to be as elaborate, maybe some trees, birds and clouds.


Day 5: I went downtown for a couple of hours this morning to put some finishing touches on the Bloomington Handmade Market electrical box public art mural. To the main image, I added a floral pattern to one of the balloon's patches, added a few more clouds and added some brown feathers and highlights to the flying goose. On the sides of the box, I added trees and clouds. The backside is where I spent most of my time this morning. I painted trees, clouds and three birds - a cedar waxwing, a blue jay and a woodpecker. The birds are done in a slightly more realistic style than the image facing the street, but I guess that's okay since they can never be compared side by side. If I were getting paid for this and didn't have a million other things to do, I would have gone to town on the backside and done more to fill it in, but at this point I think I'm going to have to call it finished. At least the painting part of it, I will still have to varnish it in a few days after the paint has had time to thoroughly dry.

Isn't that amazing?! And doesn't it LOOK amazing! It's located at the corner of 6th & Walnut, so when you drive by, think about Vincent and all of his hard work and the Market! 


Wanna follow Vincent and all his other adventures? Go Like him on Facebook and you can!

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