Paint the Plugs

So, if you follow us on twitter, you saw our latest tweet about picking up supplies for our Paint the Plugs entry. If you don’t follow us, what are you waiting for? We tweet helpful design tips, inspirational design ideas and insights into the daily happenings of our studio. So, stop everything you are doing and go click the “follow” button now. We’ll be here when you get back!

Anyway, today we wanted to let you in on the details of the Paint the Plugs project and the design we came up with for our plug, aka. fire hydrant. I’m sure you’ve seen these community projects around here, or around your town, where artists from the community are called to submit designs for painting public objects like, well, fire hydrants – to bring some fun, personality and creative arts to the city streets.

Here are a few examples to clarify what I’m talking about.

Here I am last year posing with the painted Mario hydrant in downtown Harrisburg. The photo is a bit blurry, I know, sorry!

This one's not in my city, but I thought it was crazy.. so I decided to show it as well!

This one is in the south Harrisburg neighborhood of Shipoke!

Well, Friends of Midtown, our local community group (which we are, of course, members of) is hosting one of these events called Paint the Plugs and, as these events often are, it’s a contest. We heard about the Paint the Plugs event a few months ago, but with our busy schedule we didn’t consider submitting a design to participate as an artist. Instead we wanted to support the project as a sponsor. So we did! Then several weeks later, we ran into the Friends of Midtown leaders at the Pride Fest of Central PA, and they mentioned that they had very few artist submissions, so they kind of talked me into designing a submission!

Our design is entitled “Illusion”.. we call it this because we plan to paint the plug to look as if it is constructed of something other than metal.. specifically wood, fabric and rope. Hopefully fooling your eye into actually believing it is.

So, check out our design concept images below!

Here is our mock-up for the design of the hydrant that we submitted to the contest.

The above image shows a close-up of how I'm planning to paint the chain links to look like rope.. cute, I think!

Happily our submission was selected to be one of the contestants, so wish us luck on the execution of prep work and painting, and even more luck on hopefully winning the contest! When the time comes, voting will be online at the Friends of Midtown website, but not until September 16th!

As of now, here is what the plug looks like.. or as we’re used to saying.. here’s the before photos!

I was assigned the hydrant on the southeast corner of Verbeke and Third here in midtown - which is nice since we are located on Verbeke and we pass this location all the time!

Stay tuned for progress updates and the finished product!