Pasting up the Poster

Today I managed to get one of my large scale posters out into public space. Myself and two friends drove to a nearby abandoned building. It's a common place for graffiti artists to enjoy large areas on wall space to test their larger pieces. I really badly wanted to get my poster out into the public domain, but as mentioned in a previous post, I was worried about the time scale of the project and the legality of the entire process that could jeopardize a lot of my work.

So we went to this derelict area, and found the perfect spot for my poster. It was next to a couple pieces of graffiti work, so I felt that it would look good surrounded by other pieces of art. I had made my own wheatpaste out of flour, water and sugar (trying to maintain an environment friendly project) which worked so much better than I had expected (as the cooking process was rather interesting!).

Since the inDesign pages that got printed out through the tile print option, each page was numbered with a row and column number so the design wouldn't get confusing. This was really helpful in the construction of my piece since it kept me organized and allowed for minimal error. Overall, it took over an hour to complete the piece, pasting each A4 sheet one by one. We also realised, as the poster grew in size with each row, that I could have used a ladder to paste the top rows. Thankfully, the place we chose actually had an upper section to it, so I was able to hang off the top of the wall and paste from above.

I'm so pleased with the results of this experiment, I think that large scale posters work really well as a way to grab and capture the attention of passer bys and the general public, and by taking them down a different route to common advertising, they can become more of an interesting way to market a product, a service, etc. I also think the contrast between clean, simple graphic design and a dirty, industrial abandoned building also really worked well and made my final poster really stand out against the grime. Given the time scale of the project, I unfortunately couldn't take the large scale posters further, but it's something I'm glad I've experimented with as a possibility not just only for future personal projects but as a method and/or way in which to present work in university modules.