Undercover Artist Makes Mural Magic

The scaffolding was rigged on a Friday and Cinzah flew into Melbourne from New Zealand at the crack of dawn and headed straight to the studio. His cover was a simple handyman doing general maintenance over the weekend. In fact, Cinzah spent the time hand painting a seven metre-high Big Foot with aerosols.

Watermark was approached in February this year with a very site-specific job, to create a huge mural in OBM's new Melbourne studio space. Courtney knew that Cinzah dabbled in the dark world of aerosol art, so got in touch.

The initial concept was to design a simple, silhouetted illustration of a Big Foot-type character, which would then be transformed into a vinyl decal or something for signwriters to project onto the wall and then paint. Watermark thought that using this method, some of the beauty and the artist’s touch would be lost in translation. Fortunately, Alf Lee and the team at OBM were more than happy to go down the hand-painted route.

Adding to the challenge was it had to be painted in secret from the rest of OBM's staff as the new studio and internal work campaign - Step Up - were to be revealed after the mural was created. The surprised faces on the designers at the Monday grand unveiling showed it was mission accomplished.  

To see how it was done, here's a timelapse video of the production -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv-RGbTgur0