Nao is a talented young singer from East London. We first met her a few years back when she was part of a group called ‘The Boxettes’. Their experimental sound involved vocals laid over beat boxing and captured us straight away.

After The Boxettes went their separate ways Nao embarked on a solo career and has been steadily gaining momentum. We were delighted to be asked to paint a giant mural for the singer, on a big wall in East London. Nao has been performing across the UK and is soon set to tour America, the pinnacle of her UK dates was a show at the Village Underground venue in Shoreditch. This wall is often painted top to bottom with street art so it seemed the perfect location for the wall mural to be painted, it is also right where guests would be queuing to get in to see the show.

We were sent some interesting imagery from the singer’s album to potentially paint onto the wall. It was great to work with such a striking, uncomplicated reference; a photo of the star cropped to eye level on a bright background. We started painting the day before her concert and used scissor lifts to reach the top of the nearly 10m high wall. All was going well, until about 2pm when the heavens opened and a rain storm of biblical proportions engulfed our graffiti artists.

The rain washed a large amount of emulsion that we had used as the background paint down the wall and over the wild hair of Nao that we had painted below! After the weather had sorted it’s act out we got on and corrected the paint spills finally putting the finished image together. The following evening we noticed lots of shots of the mural on social media, posted by fans attending the concert.

This was a really fun project for us, we feel that hand painted advertising has so much soul compared to a printed billboards and it fits with music artists so well. It was great to work on subtle advertising like this, no hashtags or album details, just a mural that rewards those who know or find out what it’s about.

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