Mural design for the Fred Jones Junior Museum of Art
EVERYDAY ITEMS
Illustrator, Photoshop
In 2023, the Fred Jones Junior Museum of Art released a call for artists, looking for mural designs from community members that pertained to the theme of “Making the arts come alive”. This was open to interpretation and artists were encouraged to use a variety of mediums, graphic vector design included. This would be featured as a mural in the museum’s event space and the winner would have their art featured for a year.
ABOUT
01 Brainstorm
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02 Design
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03 Assemble
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01 Brainstorm ✴ 02 Design ✴ 03 Assemble ✴
01 BRAINSTORM
When thinking about a prompt such as “Making the arts come alive”, one thinks of dance, movement, and light. But how do you capture that across mediums? Physical, digital, painting, sculpting, singing, drawing; whatever the result, it has to be some sort of collage. When I stumbled across the call for artists, it was only a week out from the due date, but I knew I wanted to participate, if only for fun. As a designer, my quickest medium is that of Illustrator. In the end, I settled on the idea of how art is alive in everything. Everything around you was created or designed by an artist or a creative. That’s when I came up with the concept of Art is Everywhere!. I decided to channel a more pop art, structured, Warhol-esq approach, and focus on everyday items. As the mural would be printed on vinyl, I didn't have to worry about the logistics of recreating it with paint, so I decided to pursue an icon-centric idea.
02 DESIGN
To get started, I had to come up with a list of everyday items. In the end, I ended up with 51 items I would have to design as icons by hand. It ranged everywhere from a tea bag to a lava lamp to a vintage microphone. Likewise, I had to find a way to tie them all together. I essentially created a brand slogan that would be featured in the center of the mural, tying together the idea. My intent was that viewers would look at the mural and reflect over how, even the most mundane things in their everyday life are pieces of art in their own way.
Each item was crafted from scratch in Illustrator using the pen tool. All icon work is my own.
03 ASSEMBLE
Assembling all 51 icons into the mural took time, as I also wanted to add labels to all of them. Fitting them all in place was like a puzzle, but worked out well in the end. They all fit dynamically and balanced each other out nicely.
RECOGNITION
In the end, the final design did not win the mural, as other entries fulfilled the ask in other beautiful ways. However, the museum recognized my skills with the pen tool and have since reached out to me for some á la carte design work and opted to keep the design, for potential future use in other applications.