When we first started Graffiti Life in 2010 we had no idea what it would become, or how long the ride would last as we set about our difficult mission to turn our passion into our profession. But here we are, six years strong and Graffiti Life continues to grow and push on with more and more innovative artwork!
2016 was an interesting time for us, as our collective welcomed some new, talented artists aboard, forged relationships with some amazing new clients and created awesome work for existing ones. Here are our 10 favourite artistic projects that we worked on in the year:
10. Live Art for Lancôme
One of many live art projects that we completed in 2016, this beautiful scene was drawn by our expert artists over three days at the Lancôme Brand Ambassadors Conference.
Our artwork centred around all things Parisian, incorporating famous landmarks, Lancôme products and Parisian lifestyle within the art. Our graffiti artists used marker pens to create the intricate piece and actually choreographed the drawing so that different features were drawn behind presentation screens to be revealed to the audience at stages during each day.
9. Promotional Work for Disney’s ‘Zootopia’
We’re very proud to count Disney as a regular client of ours and it’s always awesome to work for them as every project seems to be a fun one! Three of our top graffiti artists were present at the first screening of Zootopia in the UK. We created this awesome giant mural live in front of specially invited guests at a secret location in London. Artists had just a few hours to paint characters from the film in intricate detail, working with Disney designs is always a joy and being part of this awesome event was definitely a highlight of our year.
8. Hearthstone Hand Painted Advertising Mural
After a busy year of mural painting it was pretty difficult to narrow down what artwork to feature in this list but this piece made it on, for a number of reasons. The artwork was from the Hearthstones video game and was dynamic and challenging to paint, the client was brave enough to not over brand the advertisement, using just a subtle hashtag to help engagement and the piece was frequently photographed and shared on social media, making this a super successful advertising project and one that we’re proud of.
7. Giant Team building Workshop for Carphone Warehouse
Graffiti team building workshops are personally my favourite service that we offer. Taking a group of people that have never used a can of spraypaint before and in a short space of time teaching them to create a cool piece of artwork is really rewarding. This workshop makes the list because it was a big one, six of our artists each worked with a group of ten to fifteen participants from Carphone’s upper management, and because it was super fun, especially when the teams began competing against one another for the grand prize.
6. Hand painted Advertising for Nao
Nao is a talented singer /songwriter that we’ve supported for a number of years. It was awesome to help promote her 2016 album with a giant mural that recreated her album artwork. The first mural was such a success that later on in the year we painted it again on a billboard in East London. We created several hand-painted advertisements for music acts this year including Drake and Bonobo but this one takes the biscuit!
5. Community Regeneration Project in Romford
This was a big one! Four walls in Romford as part of a community regeneration programme. Residents of Romford submitted their artwork for consideration and four winning pieces were selected and recreated by our graffiti artists on a huge scale. The feedback we received on this project was overwhelming and the community have been super appreciative of their new art!
4. Offices of Booking.com
Of all the office re-decoration that we completed in 2016, this was our favourite. It took a team of artists three days to complete the murals in the breakout area of booking.com’s new office. We finish most interiors within a day but as this was painted on a corrugated metal surface our painting time tripled. Our client had tried a number of different vinyl companies to realise their vision, each said that it couldn’t be done. It was a huge challenge and that’s why it made the list!
3. Giant Colouring Book for Harry Potter
We had so much fun with this one! Recreating pages from the Harry Potter Colouring Book on a giant scale and letting the public loose to colour them in. Engagement on social media was through the roof and everyone that got involved loved the event. The planning was a lot of hard work but the results were so worth it!!
2. ‘Art Attack’ for Sky Football
We don’t just get asked to paint walls, the requests for weird art projects keep coming, this time the job was creating a footballers face out of shirts. Okay… cool! Our team worked with drones filming overhead to ensure that everything within the ‘portrait’ was accurate and the finished results aired on Sky Sports debuting football show. It was a nice challenge to use techniques that we have learnt painting on upright surfaces and transfer them to creating artwork on the floor. More of this please!
1.Promotional Graffiti Campaign for Jungle Book
In at number 1, was another banger for regular client Disney. This project was a monster to organise and took a team of eight of our best graffiti artists to pull off. We worked through the night to create an urban jungle in the middle of London, painting characters from the live action Jungle Book movie as well as jungle scenery. The space became a parkour park that the public were able to get involved with as well as watch the professional parkour players there during the event.
