This week we traveled to Eaton Square Upper School, in Piccadilly, just opposite Green Park. The school is modern with a forward thinking attitude. They felt that their canteen area was blank and uninspiring, our brief was to bring some creativity to the space.
The scheme they had in mind was to take on an industrial and urban feel, as the canteen had been kitted out with MDF chipboard/OSB panels. The core brief was to be “true to London”, and the school management wanted a painted mural on an archway, so it looked like a doorway, patched up with an MDF panel.
We began creating some designs but what particularly resonated with the school team was a mural we had created for another client, which was of lots of landmark London silhouettes on a wall. They really appreciated this idea and wanted to try and re-create something using images and icons that held meaning to them and the school. They added to the brief by requesting the inclusion of the building number of the school, creating the “106 Canteen”.
Once they were happy with the revised design iconography, they expanded their thinking to include similar installations in the rest of the space. The client suggested we do a London skyline that ran the length of the chipboard that was above the breakfast bar/canteen worktop- a 10cm high expanse of chipboard, which was too small for spray-paint alone. The team created a repeat London skyline onto a stencil in order to utilise a combination of marker pens and spray-paint, cutting the silhouette shape of the skyline as a repeat pattern across the full panel. It worked perfectly. Having a London skyline running around the entire canteen, where the wooden chipboard areas were, made the space coherent, and really pulled the whole room together.
The client was extremely happy once the artwork had been completed and delivered, despite the evolving brief. We commissioned a time-lapse video of the graffiti artists painting live in the canteen – which turned out to be a really great content piece as added benefit for the client. It was fantastic for our creative team to work with a client who was open to approach with ideas and suggestions, and this gave us the flexibility we needed to create an artwork to be proud of.