Whore week continues. Today it's the turn of wall whoring. Some of you may already know that back in February I produced a mural for Tokyo Otaku, a Japanese import shop in Derby's Cornmarket. The shops details can be found here: www.tokyootaku.co.uk.

Since completetion it's gone down well with the owner Wil (who rewarded me not just with cash but some rare as hell rips of Downtown, a little known MTV cartoon) and the customers. In fact the money made from the job was used to finance Fecal Depots first issue which in turn was sold through the shop resulting in often meeting new fans face to face. Anyway, that piece ended up looking like this:

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Cut to early June. Fecal Depot had just sold out in a little over two months and word of mouth got me a job doing another mural for Future Dimensions, an internet cafe in central Swindon (www.futuredimensions3in1.co.uk). The money looked good so I took it.

The piece chosen by the manager Paul was drawn up at A3 and blown up to A0 at a local printers. This was then smeared in graphite, taped to the wall and transferred by redrawing the entire piece over the photocopy. This is a photo of me peeling the photocopy off the wall.

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The flash was pretty strong so you can barely see the faint H graphite transfer on the wall. Squint and you might make it out.

The whole piece then took about a week and a half to completely paint with a variety of black and white paint markers. The manager, Paul was kind enough to allow an unlimited materials budget (which handy as the job killed about 4 paint markers which are fairly pricey). The end result was this:

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To be honest, there's a lot of errors in the forms and line art that show up at close up like this. Mostly because A0 was the biggest thing i'd ever done and I could'nt adapt.

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See, from this distance it's looking a lot more tolerable on the eye despite still being quite overcrowded composition wise. The was meant to be a second mural that would stretch a whole room but due to time constraints it did'nt come to fruition.

Future Dimensions 3 in 1 is at 16 Commerical Road, Swindon and actually opens to the public this weekend. Catering to LAN gamers the shop offers internet access, xbox 360 system link, photo developing and canvas print services - it's aim is to be Swindon premier "cyberlounge" which it gets by the default logic of being Swindon's ONLY "cyberlounge".

If this reads a little forced & too blurb like it's because they gave me money to throw paint at a wall and basically fuck about thus having more than earned a decent write up on that basis alone.

Tomorrow: The Beano and The BBC.

Aaron "Smurf" Murphy
Same Bat Time, Same Bat Hill
06/08/08