In early September I had a message from a project called
DuDug. They asked me if I would be interested in helping them out with their
project and if I’d be interested in painting a mural on a ship, not your
everyday request! This is the picture they sent me.
They sent some background info and so I did some
digging for myself. It made for interesting reading.
In 1979 the owner of the Duke of Lancaster created "The Funship” it was ahead of its time and became a modern leisure
complex with bars, hotel accommodation, conference suites, arcade machines,
restaurants, shops etc, etc. It traded in this capacity very successfully for almost 6
years but as soon as the ship arrived the venture was suddenly attacked by the
council and it ended up in the high court.
Every time the owners beat the council in court they changed
tact and attacked them on something else. In the end they closed the doors in 1990
and locked the ship up. She’s a time capsule.
The aim of the project it to open up the Black Duke as an
open-air Gallery. The aim is for the ship to be covered in unique pieces of art
and open up the ship once again piece by piece, room by room to the general
public. Artists have already started making their mark.
Kiwie has already done two pieces on the ship
This gave me a new problem- how to paint a 12 meter high
mural? quite a task for a stencil artist. I did the design of the piece and
totted up the different colours involved- 8 which made it even less feasible to
stencil.
The difficulty I could see would be keeping the scale and
proportion of the image right so last Thursday 27th in the evening I got
started.
I used a projector to size the image on the ship and get the outline
shape and proportions drawn up. This in itself was a tricky task, due to the
cold and the damp the platform the projector was on kept moving down so the
majority of the lines where out by a considerable amount. In the end I decided
to draw the black areas the best I could and hand paint the rest of the image
from the reference photographs I’d brought with me- essentially doing it by eye
to match the picture.
I had to wait until daylight for this on the Friday and
so pressed on as best I could.
It was definitely a huge change from stencil painting but
one which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was great to meet a group of people who are
so passionate about not only the ship but the artwork too.
I hope with continued
support from other artists and the public that the project is the success it deserves
to be and I’ll continue to help where I can. Here's the final image.
Please help support the project.www.dudug.co.uk
Link to the mural photoset http://www.flickr.com/photos/bungleart/sets/72157631669730535/
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