It’s the second mural to grace the 75ft long exterior wall of the 7-11 building. Next to it sits another one of #TheAvenue’s public art successes, a bright and bold attention grabber by local artist Ruben Rojas — it simply reads “LOVE”.
7-11 Building, 35th St. & University Ave in City Heights.
The total painting time for this piece came out to just under 15 hours, completed over the course of two weeks. For two consecutive weekends, I painted in the evenings, using a projector periodically to transfer the design large scale. There were a few unexpected challenges, namely:
No Fluorescent paints (Neon colors) could be used in this piece to achieve the “neon tube” lighting effect because neon colored paint has poor color permanence in sunlight (neon colors fade fast when used outdoors)
Fully covering the black background shape took much longer than expected and used more paint than I anticipated because of how thoroughly textured the wall and even the bricks themselves are
Before this idea could become a piece of public art, I needed to come up with a solid plan and some sort of sketch or digital mock up to show my friend Carlos Quezada of Love City Heights, so that he could start seeing what I had in mind. Below I’ve included my digital mockup (left) image, as well as the image broken down into various layers/shapes which I projected onto the wall and then painted in.