Sugar

So i haven't blogged in a while. I thought I'd talk about my experience when I was hired to redesign the walls in the club 'Sugar' in Lan Kwai Fong.

Early this year in January, Sugar decided to go through a minor facelift, and in doing so, I was hired by Blac Designs's Zachary Fu to redesign the walls with some ART.

Basically the design brief and proposal stage went through several stages, from combining 'sexy' with 'buddhism', to 'graffiti turntables', to 'hiphop' + 'naked girls', until finally coming to a point where they wanted a 'purely decorative aesthetic'. If you're a designer or an artist, you're usually a bit skeptical when a client says they want a 'purely decorative aesthetic'. It usually mean's they want something 'pretty' but with no purpose. -_-

So me and my project director who was responsible for the entire Sugar facelift decided to combine everything we've done in the initial proposal stages into this 'purely decorative aesthetic'. The concept was to create these abstract shapes that would align the walls. But to make things more interesting, I would hide imagery within these shapes. :)

The downside was, for the 3 days that Sugar went through renovation, I had a 24 hour time-frame to paint the whole thing.

The two wall's combined add up to about 60 x 10 feet. Not including the entrance tunnels.

First things first. Used chalk lines to draw everything out in charcoal proportionate to the design. I was fortunate to have a bunch of friends help me out given the tight timeframe to paint the walls.

The back wall.

My friends helping out...

I outlined in black paint.

...while my monkeys filled in the blanks.

What sucked was that the dust from the renovation earlier in the day would stick to the first layer we painted. We ended up having to paint over everything 2-3 times on top of the first layer in order to get that 'black' black.. Stressful indeed.

A finished wall. (the back one)

Here are some before and after shots:

The design outlined in chalk.

Painted!

Before. Outlined in chalk.

Monkey filling.

Painted!

This is the entrance before (The glass panel was a new addition to the facelift)

Painted!

Before.

Painted!!

Can you see the girl?

It was interesting how we got a lot of different interpretations after this. Apparently only half of the people are able to see the girl, when we were on location.

In porn, we refer to this as the money shot.

The night it re-opened. Literally 14 hrs after we finished the finishing touches. You can't tell, but everyone's leaning up against the wall with their feet. Awesome -_-

2 of the 5 friends who helped me that night I have returned the favor. I am currently in the process of repaying the third one back. You might see me shamelessly handing out flyers this Friday in LKF. If you do, please be nice.

Regardless of the stress with the tight deadlines and the unexpected during those 24 hrs, it was a very exciting gig. It's one thing to see your work on your computer, another to see it print. But to see it physically on the walls of a venue, hand-painted, is quite a satisfying experience. Until of course you actually go to club Sugar. But I did meet a nice girl that night :)

On another note, I have recently been accepted into the Senses Group community. It's a design group that mostly outsources its projects to a selected group of designers within their own community, on an invite basis only. Woot!