Late last year (Dec 2019), I had the wonderful opportunity to begin working with Sourced Group to produce a series of Murals for their Singapore office.
It began with a test to design mural for their kitchen area. I knew that stylistically they wanted black line drawing with simple colours, as they told me they liked that from my Huevember practice drawings.
Thematically, they wanted buildings or locations representative of Singapore, but with a more cultural perspective instead of just the touristy aspects of it.
This is what I came up with:
The illustration is based on Arab street with the Sultan Mosque as the focus. I chose to frame it as I think it looks better without the pipes on top interrupting the design. Moreover the patterns on the frame are referenced from the pattern on the mosque structure, and may also echo the oriental pattern of the Peranakan tiles.
I also steered away from more modern urban city-scape as I thought that the kitchen area is usually a brief reprieve from the work desk for employees to recharge, so perhaps a depiction of a slightly more leisurely landscape may be suitable despite the corporate environment.
This design was well liked, I was hired to propose a different design because they prefer not to have depictions of religious buildings in a office setting.
After some discussion, the location was decided to be of the culturally significant Lau Pa Sat, and this was the design and mural:
In terms of process, I actually pass by Lau Pa Sat daily to and from their office, so I took some reference pictures (first 2 photos) to supplement the reference I found online (last photo)
Below are some colour exploration:
I started with simple colours initially, the blue/turquoise and red made less saturated and lighter so that the mural will not be too obnoxious.
However, that made it less obvious that they were their brand colours as their brand colours are brighter and more saturated. It was a sudden stroke of brilliance incorporate the brightest gradient in the single beam of light in the mural, as it finally made the design pop and pulled the entire picture tighter together.
Finally, below is a few pictures from the painting process:
I used the uneven surface (The painted over door) on the wall to help align my sketch from an earlier mock up.
A few more pictures of the completed mural and details:
The mural was very well received upon it's completion, so I will be doing a few more designs around their office - look forward to future posts! ^^
