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Dan Howard,
March 23, 2017
We’ve been busy, creative bees over the past couple of months, teaming up with the Leeds College of Art on an office wall mural brief for their third-year Illustration students.
As we’ve recently moved into a five-star office space in Saw Mill Yard, we wanted something unique and personal that was characteristic not just of us as an agency, but of Holbeck’s saw mill industrial past. Our main meeting room, named ‘The Fell’ (there’s a theme here…) was in need of some personality on its bare grey wall, and instead of hiring a professional artist, we thought it’d be much more ‘Boutique’ to get some of Leeds’ young, creative talent involved!
So, we sent a professional brief over to the Leeds College of Art and we received some fantastic submissions – we were blown away by the level of artwork we received, and impressed by the students’ attention to detail and justification behind their designs.
After some careful deliberation, we chose our design and got in touch with Ian Fulcher to let him know the great news! He was incredibly modest but excited to get cracking on the live brief, which counted towards one of his third-year modules.
Ian spent the day at Boutique on 15th March to bring his concept to life:
“After receiving the brief I was keen to come up with a design that not only represented the local mill history, but one that I could also successfully replicate by hand onto the grey wall. As someone who predominantly produces digital artwork it was a great challenge for me to create a striking, graphical design whilst retaining the hand-drawn element. I used a projector to transfer the design onto the given space in ‘The Fell’, then outlined in white pencil so I knew exactly where to fill in. I chose white Posca acrylic paint pens of varying thickness to paint with because the mural space was a nice manageable size, making the ‘Projector & Posca’ approach favourable over ‘gridding’ and re-drawing it out by hand, and giving a much cleaner result than brushes.
I’ve followed artist Tom J. Newell for a long time and am inspired by his single colour mural work using Poscas. I’ve also had some pointers from pro-muralist and sign painter Pete Barber, who I assisted with some large-scale painting at the Lyon Works, Templar Lane in Leeds last summer. I still can’t quite believe my design was chosen – it’s been a great experience working with the guys at We Are Boutique and it has given me a whole load of confidence to pursue further large-scale, ‘live’ drawing projects in the future.”
Here’s a time-lapse video of Ian in action:
Check out Ian’s work on Instagram – @IanFDesigns.
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